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PowerPoint Rant Costs Colonel His Job
twoallbeefpatties writes "Wired reports that a 61-year-old reservist in Afghanistan was fired from his job as a staff officer after writing a sardonic op-ed criticizing the daily briefings provided by his taskforce, portraying them as little more than a neverending stream of redundant PowerPoint slideshows. This came after attempts to reform the process by giving his superiors a presentation that, of course, included five PowerPoint slides." Maybe he should have presented it as an art project instead of a complaint.
...Power point corrupts absolutely
You're either with the gargantuan effort to move the drinks cabinet six inches closer to Kandahar, or you're with the terrorists.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Not only that, he specifically called out his own position as having too many and himself as unproductive. I think any of us would get fired if we went to our boss and said: "We have WAY too many software engineers, I can't swing a dead cat around here without hitting one! And I should know, I've got nothing but time to swing dead cats around the office because I haven't been productive in TWO full months! And let me tell you, their no fucking good once you hit a software engineer with one cause the tail breaks right off. You see? I mean look at this fucking thing, what am I supposed to do with a dead cat without it's fucking TAIL?! HOW am I supposed to SWING this thing now, HUH?! Tell me that BOSS man!?!?!"
Unfortunately sometimes you can't just talk one-on-one to everyone and you will have to present information to a large group. Your options for presenting information to a crowd:
--vocal: just talking for an hour, which is popular in many religions, and we all remember what the sermon was about last Sunday, right?
--visual text: just endless paragraphs so they can read along which, as far as I can tell, no one does
--multimedia: pictures, audio and video that attempts to explain in a manner easily digestible, hence Powerpoint
The delicious irony of explaining the situation with what might as well be a powerpoint slide. Nice bullet points. A+++ would buy again.
More
The legs.
There, I've increased your productivity by a factor of 5!
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
If Powerpoint is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb.
o T
o L
o D
o R
If you are lucky you will target 20% of the audience on average during the presentation.
Is the proportion of British soldiers in US military presentations usually that large?
*ducks*
(literally)
(-1, Flamebait)
(literally)
*ducks again*