Yes, they should be that smart. But your virtual meeting software should be that smart also - either an option (‘all muted on join’) for the meeting organizer, or some low limit for all meetings (we use Teams, and it looks like if you are the 4th or higher person to join a meeting, you are auto-muted).
Our Teams set up lets any participant mute another. I have used that to silence those who are engaged in conversation on the phone or with someone else when in a meeting.
Here we go again! I’m working on a project that happens every year, so you’d think we’d have a good process by now. But you would be wrong! A new person is in charge of this project now (and management for that department is wonky). She has asked if she can send me the things I need in Canva. 
No thank you. I am not saving multiple pages of text and photos from Canva. There is no reason why they should be using Canva for this project, because I’m doing the layout in InDesign, because that is my job. Every year it’s something new with these people!
If you need an anecdote to warn them against using inappropriate apps to do page layout, I had the CEO of a printing company tell me:
We often bump up the estimate for an upcoming project if the print collateral is laid out in anything non-Adobe. I explain it by saying that if a brochure has been done in Microsft Word, we know we’ll spend extra time on the the problems we’ll have in pre-press.
It’s like we’re air traffic controllers watching a long line of DC-10s and Boeing 747s land without a hitch… but suddenly there’s a blip on the radar and it’s a Cessna with an engine smoking, coming in fast but erratically.
digs, we are definitely not sending a Canva file to the printer. 
She sent me a Word doc that’s 75MB. I’m predicting that it has many text boxes. I will need a lot of Morning Chocolate today.
75 MB!!?? Holy shit! I get depressed when I see one is 7. I’d need much more than chocolate to deal with that.
I’m cry-laughing right now. She wants me to save image files from the Word doc (60+!), but it is not possible to save them. The option is grayed out on the menu. I’ve never seen this before, and I have no idea how they managed to do this. I’m on an emotional roller coaster. Not sure if I’ll make it through the day!
If you don’t want to trip over the line into full-on crying, you need to get her original images (even if they’re old prints you have to scan). Even if you could extract images from Word (wha…?), they’d be too low-rez and too low-quality.
.
ANECDOTE:
We were all set to go to press with a really nice “capabilities catalog” (ok, a big brochure) for an engineering firm. We were late, waiting for the originals of the cover photos from the client, so we dropped in on them…
“Look, we really need those photos! Can you just get them for us now?”
“Well, we all looked for them, and it seems… Ed took those.”
I didn’t understand his resigned tone…“Okay, are they here on a company server somewhere?”
“No, they’re Ed’s…”
“So we need to talk to Ed? Can we do that now? The printer’s waiting.”
“Well, Ed got fired a year ago. Took his filing cabinet with him.”
“Let me guess. With all your corporate photos, which were only in hard copy and strips of negatives?.. sigh.”
“But you can use the photos from our web site, right?”
“Oh, good, you have digital versions of those originals!”
“No, I just mean can’t you right-click and save those?”
“Those are (frantically doing math in my head) about 5 inches wide on screen, so 350 maybe 400 pixels wide… that’d be a little over an inch in print.
I could redesign the cover to … (frantically scribbling)… just have a column of one-inch-square photos down the right side…”
They shrugged, said they supposed that’d be fine (revealing that those engineers didn’t really care about the aesthetics… they probably would’ve been fine with 400-pixel-tall JPEGS stretched to 11" tall).
TL/DR: I’ve cried too.
Are they .doc files or .docx? If they’re the latter, make a copy of the document and replace the .docx with .zip. You should then be able to open the zip file and find the images in a nice little directory of their own, and possibly in the original resolution. (Or you could try telling Word to make them all their original size and then doing the .zip thing.)
Unfortunately, they won’t have the captions, if any, with them. They’ll be named image#####.jpg (or maybe png), and it’ll be up to you to figure out which is which. You’ll also get any graphics used in headers or footers, which can be fun.
WHYYYYYYYYY do people do this?? I see this all the time in presentations… Some poor little graphic has been hopelessly deformed to make it fit in a large space.
The things people do to poor defenseless photos…
Morgyn, some of the files are docx, but this didn’t work for me. Maybe because I’m using a Mac. They did send me some of the photos, and I think it might work to copy the others and paste them back into a Word document and then save them.
An update: The person who sent me this put the whole damn calendar in the Word doc, in tables. 
Which, if you haven’t seen my previous posts, is my job. Why? I don’t understand why people do things like this.
To make it worse, instead of starting the week on Sunday like we usually do, she has the week starting on Monday. I’m 100% sure that when I ask them which day they want to start the week on, they will tell me one day, and then they will decide later they want to start it on the other day. If I change it now, I am not changing it back.
Well, that’s one that should be easy to handle. When they choose a day, tell them “No backsies!”
I can’t tell you how many times I went ahead and dealt with stupidity, all the while thinking “Oh, man, I can’t wait til I can tell The Pit about this…”
Hope it’s helping you, too.
When things like this happen, my first thought is, yippee, something for the workplace gripes thread! 
I used to post a lot more before my former evil boss left, so surprisingly, it is better than it used to be.
kaylasdad99, I like the “no backsies” policy. I’m considering not giving them a choice in this, because (1) they did not ask me, which would be the respectful, professional thing to do, and (2) I think it would be confusing for the people who use the calendar, because we’ve been doing this for a few years and the week has always started on Sunday.
My online software engineering consultant employer has planned an all expenses paid Xmas lunch function.
Except it is located at a restaurant/club known to be owned by local Russian gangsters, and in a country that dreamed up and instigated apartheid - the theme is “All white”.
I can’t decide if I should boycott or if I should go with the theme and turn up looking like this:
My small gripe for this morning: people who ask me to do something urgent for them who do not answer my emails when I have questions. I have a couple of coworkers who are really bad about this. If you want my help, you need to work with me a little bit.
IT just pushed out an update to Firefox. I has completely overwritten my history, cookies, and bookmarks.
I have lost three years worth of resources.
I have just passed through Angry to that transcendent state where I could literally strangle whoever is responsible without breaking a sweat.
Do mention in your email “I will not be able to start on this [project, task, birthday card] until these questions are answered.”
We learned to do this with a VP who’d dump an urgent project on someone (without telling the supervisor),then complaining to said supervisor that the project isn’t done yet.
The email wouldn’t motivate the VP, but it was worth it just to show the supervisor that we weren’t slacking, but waiting for info.
Incandescent rage is a reasonable response to this. Can IT get any of it back? Or is it gone for good?
I really value your thoughts and ideas. Never mind that although numerous other people in the organization have been telling me to contact you for 6 months, I’ve never communicated with you and the only reason I’m doing so now is I have a deadline in two weeks to talk to everyone in your position.
I’ve already warned my boss that at tomorrow’s meeting, truths will be spoken. She fully supports me.