Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Unforgivable

Running 45 minutes over time on a 1 hour seminar.

Even worse: running that late on a seminar that people are mostly attending for political reasons, rather than because of any real interest.

Even worser still: running that late on a seminar that no one can escape from (because everyone in the universe department felt it politically necessary to attend and had to be squeezed into a tiny venue with no sneaking-out room between the extra rows of chairs).

Worser and worser: looking at your watch, realising you have gone 15 minutes over already, and continuing with your prepared talk anyway, only at double the speed (so that not only are we trapped, but we are trapped in a seminar we can no longer follow).

And worstest of all: giving the entire Powerpoint presentation in "edit" mode instead of as a slide-show, which not only demonstrates technological incompetence, but makes the font too small for anyone to read.

7 Comments:

Nicola said...

Oh, God. How awful. Especially the PowerPoint part. I hate amateurs.

Aurelius said...

On principle, everyone should have walked out. Otherwise, they will never learn.

StyleyGeek said...

Yeah, the political part made that difficult, aurelius :) Also, the presenter really is a very nice guy and no one wanted to hurt his feelings. He just hasn't a clue about public speaking.

Anonymous said...

Oh my god, I think I'd have committed hari-kiri by the end of that. The PPT thing would have my blood pressure so high!

Vinny said...

Did they make the worstest even worser by reading the slide to you? That makes me CRAZY. Why are you here then? Couldn't you have emailed me the slideshow and we all could have stayed home?

I appreciate that he has no clue about speaking. Now comes the hard part: Who will tell him?

Anonymous said...

Well I actually liked the PPT-in-edit-mode idea. I'm going to do that next time I present something. And I'm going to put a bunch of notes on the bottom of the slide like: "Make sure the stupid audience understands this brain-numbingly simple concept. God they're stupid." Also, I would show all my hidden slides and then complain about Microsoft and that those slides were supposed to be hidden. Yeah.

StyleyGeek said...

Sam, that is a fantastic idea :)

Berniera, thankfully not. The slides were actually (from what I could make out of them) well chosen and illustrative (tables and examples and suchlike).