Powerfully Painful Presentations

In the corporate world, it is not very difficult to randomly end up as an audience for a power point presentation. Power point presentations are 50 times more effective than a sleeping pill or a tranquillizer, where 50 is the average number of slides that every presentation contains. The sleep is gradual though. It takes 3 steps in 3 slides to take you into the dream world.

THE TITLE SLIDE:

This indicates what is coming. Usually, it will not give any idea about the content, but when the speaker starts with his/her introduction of the topic with this slide, it will all be very clear – you are about to experience a nice hour long siesta. The introduction and the title slide serves like a nice little lullaby that makes you comfortable in your push back chair. Here is an example slide:

BULLETS:

Bullets are the ammunitions of a Powerpoint presenter (Pun intended). Statistically there is atleast 5% of the presentation devoted to bullet points. Nah, I just made that up, It should be 20%. Oh well, who cares anway! Oh and this is the step when you Yawn. You will yawn hard and deep and wide like a Hippopotamus. Bulletproofing will not help. Here is a sample slide (The contents of the slide is only an example and is not indicative of anything real. If it does coincide with the presentation you just spoke/listened to then it was definitely stolen from here)

GRAPH:

The intention of a slide that contains a complicated and completely unintelligible graph is to show the coolness and the geek quotient of the presenter. Nothing makes you look intelligent than a picture of bars of various heights. This is it. This is the step where you fall asleep. It will be an instant knock out. But, you have to keep in mind that if you force yourself to be awake beyond slide 3, you will suffer from Insomnia for the rest of the presentation and you will be unable to sleep at all after that. Here is an example graph slide:

ORGANIZATION CHART:

If you are still awake and reading the slides, you will come across atleast one slide like this if someone is getting released from your project or getting fired altogether.

1. You will not know where you fit in this figure and under whom.

2. You will keep wondering who that Cute girl is, as there are not one woman in your floor, leave alone your project. No, it is not your dream girl or your boss’s dream girl.

3. This chart would have been prepared a week ago so the Guy with a beard would have shaved and someone else would have grown the beard. This is how several positions get interchanged in the corporate world.

4. You will count how many shirts you have.

The last slide will have the Letters Q and A put together by “&”. This is were a lot of other folks will start speaking besides the speaker himself. This is due to a known deficiency syndrome called Interest Defect (Known in Tamil as Aarva kolaru). “Doubtfire”s will be firing the doubts at the presenter who will answer them in 3 possible choices – Yes, No, Pass. A point to note here is, if you see yourself speaking or any cute girl speaking, then you are simply hallucinating, just go back to sleep.