Heather Jovanovic, a 25-year-old college student currently holed up with her parents outside of Toronto, recently walked me through her newfound suite of white lies and convenient outs. “Meals are really big now, so it’s like, ‘I have to go make lunch,’” she said. “I’ve also found that being like, ‘Oh, I just started watching a movie with my parents and I can’t just get up and leave’” reliably shuts down an invitation. She’s also excused herself from calls because of her barking dogs and because the battery’s running low on whatever device she’s using. “There’s no arguing with a dead phone,” she said.

According to Feldman, the excuses people provide in order to skip or curtail social encounters frequently blame an outside force, such as kids or pets that need checking up on, or a work call that can’t be missed. “It’s a social nicety that ensures that we’re not really culpable,” he says.

These outside forces aren’t always fabrications—they can be truths, albeit convenient ones. Gary Leff is experienced in shutting down conversations without making enemies. He is the author of the air-travel blog View From the Wing, and in pre-pandemic times he flew on a plane about once a week, meaning he regularly found himself a captive audience to chatty seatmates. “You can start typing away on a laptop,” he wrote to me in an email. “‘I'm sorry, I have a presentation to finish’ has never failed for me. Is it a white lie? For me, never. I’m always working.”

Under lockdown, Leff is remaining truthful as he ends interactions. He’s taken to saying that he has “another call coming up.” “Notice I said ‘coming up’ rather than ‘about to start,’” he said. “In other words, it is at some future point—true! And there are things you need to do between now and the call—also true!” People looking after children right now also have a near-permanent excuse for leaving a call, he noted.

Read: The three equations for a happy life, even during a pandemic

If convenient truths represent one end of the excuse spectrum, the other end consists of contrived falsehoods. That’s the realm of a more daring contingent of callers, who are elevating social deception to an art form.

Two friends of mine recently told me about a tactic that they had used to end interminably long video calls at a former job, and that could easily work during the pandemic as well. When they were ready for the call to be over, they’d freeze their face and body in place for a moment, to make it seem as if their Wi-Fi had gone out, and then very carefully, off-camera, hit the End Call button. Followed up with a short message such as “Whoops, I think my internet cut out. I think we’re done, but let me know if you have any questions!,” the “frozen face” worked exceptionally well.

Destiny Lopez, a graduate student currently at home with her mother in Waterbury, Connecticut, told me about a more surreptitious way to get out of a group video call. It’s the digital equivalent of casually backing out of a conference room and hoping no one notices: “I turned off my audio slowly, and then I turned off my camera slowly, and then I just left the meeting,” she said. “I just cut off a small piece of myself, little by little, and then I'm out.”