Your Favorite PowerPoint Story

The good folk over at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog have asked readers to contribute Your Favorite PowerPoint Story:

We had a lot of traffic, comments and feedback when Toby wrote his “Don’t Use PowerPoint” post last week. We thought we’d play off of that post to ask the readers to comment on some of their PowerPoint stories (we said they could be good or bad… but, we preferred bad) and share them with us for this week’s Elephant Post. I’ve used PowerPoint for many, many years, and it is a rare occasion that everything that worked on my PC at home or in the office ended up working perfectly at the presentation.

We actually only ended up with one “horror story.” Which makes me think that some of you were just too embarrassed to tell us about some of your experiences. Hopefully, for those of you brave enough, you’ll add your story in the comments.

At a job interview in a past life (not for my current POW – i.e. place of work), I was asked to show up with a PowerPoint presentation on a topic of my choice related to the job. Of course, the techies had trouble connecting the laptop I had been loaned to their network projector, then, for some reason the PowerPoint program wouldn’t load, etc.

So, no PowerPoint.

I had to improvise: I talked for 20 minutes and made lots of vigorous hand and arm gestures for emphasis. It was either that or spontaneously combust. Things actually went well, I think. Almost got the job.