Murphy's Law states: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." This is especially true and especially painful when there is an audience involved.

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This blog was active from April, 2008 to July 2012.
It is no longer being updated. It will continue to be maintained for reference purposes.

Overheard on Twitter: Should have brought the Kodak projector.

swstevenConference presentation is delayed. AV problems. Should have brought the Kodak projector. @SWsteven (Steven Widmann)

Bookmarked: The Oops Factor (Two Well Read)

The Oops Factor (Two Well Read) – “It is a fact if you perform live, sooner or later you will meet with a genuine, bona fide onstage disaster. Generally, these seem to fall into two categories. The first is the self-made conflagration where lyrics evaporate into thin air, the high note that was there at sound check mysteriously vanishes in performance, clothing falls apart, and stools move themselves about the stage so that you find yourself in a heap on the floor. I could go on, but being the superstitious type I’ll stop here. The second is the stuff performance legends are made of, those moments where, despite your diligent rehearsal and careful plotting of every moment, elements beyond your control enter in and all hell breaks loose. Sometimes it comes from your fellow musicians onstage, sometimes from the tech booth, and sometimes from that ever unpredictable element, the audience.”

[Great stories in the post as well as in the comments. Artistic presentations oops are as much fun business presentation disasters.]

Bad Signs

©iStockphoto.com/Viorika

©iStockphoto.com/Viorika

They call the meeting venue’s electrician “Sparky”. Unfortunately it’s not so much a affectionate, if clichéd, nickname. It’s more a description of his work.

Inspired by a Nicholas Bate post from earlier in the week. (BTW, check out Nicholas’ terrific ongoing series, How To Be Brilliant: 1-50, currently on number 39.)

Bookmarked: If You Only Listen to One PowerPoint Tip…(Overnight Sensation)

If You Only Listen to One PowerPoint Tip…(Overnight Sensation) – “I did this once but had the good sense to save my file in an older file format just in case. When it loaded up, I was all excited – until I noticed that the system lacked the font I used and defaulted to different font. Normally, a different font isn’t a big deal but in my case the new font was spaced differently which caused 75% of my slides to have text falling off the screen. I was lucky that I also saved it in Adobe PDF format which preserved my fonts. Of course, even with some work my presentation didn’t fill the screen, lost its transition effects and I essentially scrolled page by page through the document. But at least the audience was able to get the full benefit of the presentation.”

Big screen blue screen of death

NIN BSoD

Don’t you hate when you see something like this happen. You know someone, somewhere had a really bad night.

You can imagine the band’s management yelling into their cell phone as techs scramble to get systems rebooted or rolled over to backup while simultaneously updating their resume in their heads. There are hundreds of  hands reaching for hundreds of phones to send pictures to roommates who decided to bail and stay back at the bar.

How many people in the audience are shouting, “Did you try control, alt, delete?!” Imagine the quiet thrill of the the elite handful who could actually knew what went wrong based on the error message. Disappointment soon followed for the elite of the elite who actually had dates as it slowly dawned on them that demonstrating this particular level of alpha nerdiness wasn’t getting them any action that night.

As much fun as it was to imagine all that, it’s not even close to what’s really happening. The big screen blue screen of death (BSoD) shown here was intentional. It’s actually part of the act and not a real OS error message. Turns out Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails is a serious Mac fanboy.

Does this picture bring back bad memories? Have you ever been unfortunate enough to see a BSoD on the screen you were supposed to be projecting something rather important on? Whether you’re the AV tech or a presenter showing your own slides, it can be a unforgettably unpleasant moment. Changes to Windows have (supposedly) pretty much eliminated the BSoD.  I don’t know if that’s true but I’ll admit can’t remember the last time I saw one.

*   *   *

Sometimes I think we take for granted how much easier it is to recover from badly timed computer failures now than it used to be.

Remember what it was like during the time of transition as 35mm slides were fading away? We had this great, new technology that saved us all a huge amount of time, money and effort, but sometimes it seemed like this great, new technology wasn’t always so great. It often failed, often in ways we never experienced before. To make matters worse, we didn’t yet have the tools necessary to easily recover from these failures.

For example, there were no USB flash drives. How many times would our bacon have been saved if there had been a storage media with enough capacity to easily transports multiple presentation files. One that also worked seamlessly and immediately with any computer you connected it to.

Remember floppy disks? Remember only having 1.44 MB of space to work with? How about ZIP drives? More storage space, but they needed to have software installed before you could use them. They also weren’t completely reliable (I still find myself waking up in a cold sweat from a vivid “Click of Death” flashback nightmare).

It was also very unlikely that the ballroom where you were presenting had Wifi and many hotels didn’t have any kind of internet capabilities at all.

So not only was it more difficult to move content between computers, this was also before it was common for just about everyone in an organization to have a laptop with them at the meeting venue. If you got the BSoD, you couldn’t just grab someone’s machine and throw the presentation on it, or run it right from a USB drive, or download it from the corporate servers, etc.

Remember, and be grateful, as you’re planning for your next life-or-death presentation: you have tremendous advantages that weren’t available just a few years ago.

Just make sure you take advantage of them.

Bookmarked: 10 Things I taught my interns (The Hopkinson Report)

10 Things I taught my interns (The Hopkinson Report) – “If you’re doing a presentation, something will go wrong. … Even with modern advances, getting everything to work right is still very difficult. Every laptop has a different set of key commands to change from the laptop screen to the overhead monitor. There’s never the right dongle to connect to a projector. The speakers are always too loud or non-existent. The internet connection doesn’t work or is too slow. I once did a presentation in front of 250 people involving a laptop hooked to a miniature camera on a tripod that was focusing on the beta version of live features on a prototype cell phone being held in vice grips. I was there an hour ahead of time, and checked everything over 5 times, and believe it or not, I was good to go. That was, of course, until 5 minutes before I went on, when the setup went dead. The unknown cause? The lamp on the projector overheated. … How can you overcome a nightmare presentation? Preparation and alternatives.” [Follows up with good suggestions]

Bookmarked: Conference nightmares. The many faces of scientific presentations (LabLit.com)

Conference nightmares. The many faces of scientific presentations (LabLit.com) – “Prof “Defeated by technology” provides good entertainment. … I remember well giving a talk at the Hammersmith Hospital in the early days of PowerPoint when, after loading the talk onto their computer, a message came up on the screen saying your talk is being modified by the MRC system. All my demure bullet point diamonds were changed to cheeky TV screens, thereby sweeping aside any gravitas I might have had. My favourite technology nightmare, however, comes from pre-PowerPoint days, back when slides were being used in a carousel projector. One presenter could not get the carousel to work and she was told to turn the carousel over and look underneath. She did this but forgot there was no lid on the carousel. She spent the next ten minutes reassembling her talk from the random pile of slides on the floor while the audience shuffled nervously and some escaped to the bar.”

Hypotheticals

gremlinHow about two quick questions, just for the fun of it…

(okay the first one’s a little boring)

Would you rather give a presentation with your slides but not your speaker notes or have your notes but not your slides?

(the second has a little more “zing“)

You’re at the crossroads, it’s midnight, the contract has been unrolled, the pen is ready and it’s time to make the deal.

Carry a spare for EVERY piece of equipment you normally use to do a meeting and the king of the AV gremlins guarantees that you will never, ever have to use them.

In other words, would you be willing to haul around two of everything you typically bring with you knowing you will never need to use the backup because nothing will ever fail? You would propitiate the gremlins by being perfectly prepared to deal with them. Your plan B could no longer involve a quick run to the Best Buy or renting something from the hotel.

(Does that sound too much like a Twilight Zone episode?)

I think that for most people, answer to the second question would really depend on what kind of meetings they were doing and what was at stake. I wonder what offer the gremlins would make someone if they already carried two of everything.

How about you? Would you go with the slides or the notes? Would you make the deal or take your chances?

Ian Whitworth: The Worst Presentation of My Life

ianCringing and laughter. Good presentation disaster stories inspire one or the other. Really good presentation disaster stories inspire at least a little of both.

This story, from Ian Whitworth’s blog, Can You Hear Me Up the Back?, ping-pongs back and forth from one to the other so often I lost track and ended up laughing at the same time I was cringing. Usually, when sharing a story that’s already been published online, I post the standard excerpt/link combination. In the case of this particular story, so many things went wrong in so many funny and cringe-worthy ways I had trouble choosing which excerpts to use. Luckily, Ian was kind enough to give me permission to publish it in its entirety. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

The Worst Presentation of My Life

Someone showed me another Steve Ballmer stage moment, in which the big guy cavorts in the sweatiest shirt since Elvis played Hawaii.

Watching it gave me terrible flashbacks to an incident long ago, and prompts the question: what’s the worst presentation you’ve ever done?

We’ve all had them. The speeches where you just want to flee the stage, run to the car park, drive until you’re deep in the forest, and stay there for the rest of your life, living off beetles and wood fungus, safe in the knowledge you’ll never run into anyone who was in the audience that day.

Mine was a speech at an interstate product launch. The day started with preparations for a pre-dawn flight. Stumbling around in the dark I forgot, for the very first time in my business life, to put on deodorant.

Sitting on the plane, I thought: hey, how bad can this be? Maybe deodorant isn’t really necessary, just one of those things that the international hygiene marketing conspiracy has thrust upon us in the last hundred years. After all, the term ‘B.O’ was coined by an ad writer just like me, creating a problem that hadn’t previously existed, to sell more Lifebuoy soap.

Mister Overconfidence Comes To Town

I got to my destination – hmm, warm weather here – and went to the venue for a rehearsal. I’d had a run of good presentations in the previous month, and was full of misplaced, up-and-coming-executive overconfidence. I figured I’d be able to wing it with the new material.

Show time. I stepped up to the lectern with my written notes. The house lights went down to black, for this was the era of weak projectors, and the lectern spotlights arced up. The reading lamp on the lectern? Not there. I couldn’t read a bloody thing.

The armpits went into peak flow. Twin tsunamis of clammy sweat fanned out across my nicely pressed shirt. My mouth filled with some sort of internally-generated tongue anaesthetic. I stared at the audience. They stared at me.

Quick, tell them a story, I thought. I launched into an anecdote. A tried and true, ‘break glass in case of emergency’ story that had never failed to get things off to a good start in other cities.

But I wasn’t in those cities, was I?

You’re Not From Round Here, Are You Boy?

Since then, years of experience has taught me that this is the town where humor goes to die. They hate any attempts at levity. You know the Chinese entombed soldiers that tour the museums of the world? That’s what the audience felt like. Neat rows as far as the eye could see, still, cold, stony. All eyes fixed on a point somewhere on the wall behind you.

Solid gold, guaranteed audience pleasing stories sailed past them untouched and went ‘splat’ against the back wall. I soldiered on, knowing that at least I had a big video finale. A pre-shot interactive thing where I appeared on the screen looking down at the lectern, so I could have a conversation with a less-sweaty version of myself. That would pull the whole show together.

Too Tricky For My Own Good

Or would have, had the under-rehearsed AV guy not started the tape in completely the wrong place, leaving me delivering lines that made no sense whatsoever, like some piece of abstract performance art.

Did I mention that this was a presentation on how to do better presentations?

Any questions? No, just a deep-space vacuum silence.  They’d moved from indifference to outright hatred.

Following me was a presenter from a competitor company, a local guy. He made a few unsubtle jibes about out-of-towners coming in and thinking they could teach the locals a thing or two. Let me assure you, the audience lapped that up.

Internal and External Drowning of Sorrows

Drinking the pain away at a nearby restaurant before the flight home, I heard the sound of sliding shoe leather and ominous clinking. I turned to face the stumbling waitress as she tipped a full tray of beers all over me.

People on the flight home quietly asked to be moved to another seat, rather than sit near the crazy-looking man in the window seat, his suit reeking of BO and beer.

“Mummy, does that man have a mental illness?”

Lessons From All This

  1. You need a major presentation trauma every so often to remind you to be better prepared.
  2. Deodorant is not a consumerism conspiracy, it is a miracle product and we should give thanks for its existence.
  3. No one died. Even when your worst fears become reality, it’ll all blow over and nobody will remember it except you.

Ian’s story is a great illustration of the first two Principles:

  1. If you can’t do without it, make sure you won’t have to. (This usually applies to things like projectors and PowerPoint files, not personal hygiene products.)
  2. Any rational response to “What’s the worse that can happen?” is most likely wrong.

Moore Speakers: Trilogy of Terror

moorespeakersThe Moore Speakers blog has been on a roll lately, posting three great stories that would cause anyone involved in the presentations biz  to wince in sympathy.

I leaned to the side and caught the falling pants with my elbow. And that is the way I remained during the rest of the talk: one hand holding the microphone and the other arm holding up my pants.

*  *  *

I once plugged a fellow presenter’s flash drive into my laptop, while it was connected and projecting on the screen (with folks milling around in the room) and the guy had a bunch of porn on it, which my adobe image indexer program immediately began indexing. Yes, the photos where showing up as thumbnails (very visible ones) on the projection screen behind us.

*  *  *

Once I was inside the building, I looked down to sign in at the lobby security desk and I saw in my reflection that my shirt underneath my blazer is gone and my bra and the girls are just hanging out there. Apparently, the weight of the computer bag I was holding had ripped the straps of my shirt and pulled it down around my butt.

Thanks for the heads up Lisa.