fine whine

I just sat through a typical PowerPoint presentation. It is my hope that in ten or twenty years if any people read this they will say "PowerPoint?" just as now we would say "Harvard Graphics?", as something new will have long since come along and deposed king Microsoft from its ill-deserved throne for slide presentation software. I can hope, can't I?

Some people may say that PowerPoint gets a bad rap. Some people also say that lima beans are tasty, too, so we can't put too much faith in most people for their opinions. PowerPoint is evil, not so much for what it is as for what it has done to the whole idea of presentations.

Incidentally, some people probably know exactly what I mean.

Take the example of the presentation through which I just sat. Thankfully it was short, but I was left with the impression that I'd really gained nothing by sitting through it rather than waiting for the slides to be emailed to me (as I am sure they will be in the near future). Fifty or so of us sat there at rapt attention as somebody read exactly what was on screen to us. She even looked up at the screen with us to do it; she didn't even have cheat sheets.

Now for a guy like me who was sitting in the back and didn't put in any contacts today, I suppose doing things her way might've been considerate, but for the rest of the ably-sighted crowd I can't help but wonder if they felt somewhat cheated, if not downright insulted. How stultifying is it to have somebody read something written in huge Arial or Times New Roman to a roomful of adults? Not since elementary school has that sort of thing happened to me, at least this blatantly. I was somewhat annoyed, you might say.

Now let me describe my approach to the slideshow presentation. I practice my material out loud first and only thereafter make slides of things that should be highlighted or reinforced. The only slide to which I stick closely is the summary, and people are lucky if I happen to throw one of those in at all (generally only doing so only to pad the runtime out to a respectable length). Everything else I basically ignore completely. I get away from the podium and try to keep the audience's attention. The slideshow goes on behind me, minus bells, whistles and other needless transitions other than being synchronized with the major points I'm making if I'm lucky enough to have a mouse, otherwise a sidekick needs to be on top of things to know when to flip my slides. As for me I don't care what's up there as I'm focusing on what I'm saying. The slides are up behind me for convention, not because I want them there.

It works for me. That said, I've never gotten real feedback if my method works for the audience or not. When I do it, though, I can be pretty sure I'm not treating anybody like a kindergartner.

Sometimes I can be such a goober. Despite having previously been master of a PBX and having root power over everybody and their phones, at my current job I am as much uninformed about what all the buttons do as anybody else. Add to that my pathological distrust of technology and it all comes together into a really weird attitude about any phone features more advanced than ordinary dialing. Take the case of transferring calls. I know that a good half of the time I am supposed to transfer a call I end up just hanging up (or at least I think so, and warn the other person of such).

What foolishness, me with my experience and computer engineering degree and all, to be stymied by a simple phone button. So today I knuckled down and attempted to make sure I was doing things correctly. I shanghaied my co-worker (thanks again, Ros!) and we did a quick three-phone test. Basically I called her, she transferred to me and I ended up answering my own phone call. She ran to the phone to say something to me but I cut here off with a "Can you hear me now? Good." and both of us laughed for a good minute or two, and sat down to return to work after a botched high-five.

And all I have to regret for it is the knowledge that I couldn't come up with anything funnier to say. But now I can transfer calls with confidence, and that's all that matters.

Despite my mental backlog of subjects to cover and movies to review, I still am at a loss for motivation to type up a daily entry. That said, here's part of an email I sent Paul Davidson, author of Consumer Joe: Harassing Corporate America one letter at a time. He'd asked what it is, exactly, that I did.

I thought I'd send a simple short answer to him, and I started typing...

(It's a decent enough story, one that I've never told so thoroughly, so I figured I'd just put it up here for posterity, and to stave off needing to write anything new for yet another day.)

Would you believe that I work for Corporate America? I work for a large garment company (third largest in women's denim) in something of a technical position, measuring, inspecting and evaluating men's and women's jeanswear. Which basically means I end up answering or dodging a lot of emails, mostly from the vendors we use south of the border and overseas. So that's the "what", the easiest of the questions to answer. The "why" stymies me, so I'll move to the "how" instead, as I had no prior experience in the garment industry before taking this position (unless eighth grade home economics class counts). It's an interesting story, really, but a long one.

In short, I needed to have a job in Ohio for my wife to get the in-state tuition rate for grad school. With a month at my disposal to land a computer engineering or IT job, I nevertheless found myself scrambling about town on the last few days, classifieds in hand (I did get a lot of movies watched, though). The day I was hired I had two opportunities, one a job in a warehouse and the other restocking Pepsi vending machines. As fate would have it, Pepsi was further away.

So I stood around with a bunch of excited people next to a squat black building.
Many of them seemed to know what was going on, and most were excited about the clothing discounts such a job would bring (I get up to 40% off at a decent number of places) and full of stories of friends and acquaintances who'd worked and so on. Nobody could really say what it was that merchandise handlers and outbound loaders were supposed to do, of course.

The weather was nice, though, so I wasn't against the whole standing-around-and-filling-out-an-application idea. If I were to do it over I think I'd bring a frisbee. Eventually I made it into the lobby, and had a discussion with a hiring guy who then signed me up for the morning shift, with the title of merchandise handler. I left knowing little more than when I had arrived about what I was to be doing--but I was now employed, which was the whole point of this exercise.

Days later, at seven o'clock sharp, I began my brief career as a merchandise handler in the cart preparation area of one of our distribution centers. Lest the suspense kill you, what I did for several months was cut open cardboard boxes, scan barcodes, and count pairs of jeans, shirts, underwear and the like. Really engaging stuff. Fortunately I was able to bend the rules and listen to books on CD and music, and I have to admit, being the only guy walking around a warehouse smiling at Bill Cosby's jokes before breakfast is an experience that everybody should have at one time or another.

Eventually they realized my talents were wasted, or I complained enough about inefficient systems, that they decided to give me a shot at another department. I soon became star student in the power equipment training classes. I learned how to drive pallet jacks, "high/lows" (like a forklift, but able to go much higher) and stock pickers (again like a forklift, but the cab raises, not just the forks). Fun stuff. I was a great driver and enjoyed that probably as much as I've enjoyed any job. Times change, particularly in the seasonally-driven fashion industry, and for a while it seemed that I might have no future with the warehouse and then, only a bleak one. I returned to the box-cutting and counting (and audiobooks) for some time, but I started getting pulled away from my duties for special projects, be they palletizing remnants, sweeping floors or lugging around boxes of labels.

One such project catapulted me out of the warehouse altogether and into the
task of sorting hanging pairs of jeans for "the office people". It was a whole different world to us "DC people" and I milked it for all it was worth. As they did with anybody who had spare time in the offices, they had me measuring garments before long and somehow my attention to detail and keen eye slipped through.

I knew those years of copy editing would pay off somehow.

So I quickly made myself indispensable for an understaffed department. And
that's how I, a computer engineer by training, got into the garment industry.

The continued practice of adding of signatures to emails has at times baffled me and at others merely given me pause to wonder. I wonder why it is necessary to have such a holdover from written correspondence when there is a standards-dictated field in every header (well, every normal one) that shows the sender's address and (usually, anymore) name. Why then to call it out a second time? Is it for ego or attention, or merely tradition that the majority of emails I receive at work contain some form of "sincerely, whoever" or "best regards" (and its sinister shorter sibling, "bgrds!") and the like?

Not that I can talk, signing as I do all but the briefest messages with a concise but polite "Thanks, Mike". There is more to it than just that, though, as it is my personal theory that in order to thank someone I need to have made a request or something like it to merit the minor bit of gratitude.

Surprisingly, not every email I send is a request for something, so I feel the need to tack one on just so I can add that simple "Thanks". Generally I toss in a "Please let us know if you have any questions", which for me is enough to then be able to throw on my gratitude (in advance) and rest easily.

There is a point to all of this. A vaguely funny one, too, at least to me.

Today I received a reply to an email that said this:

Thanks
For moment I  do not have more questions.
 
Ernesto

Ah, Ernesto, if only you knew what a laugh this gave me so early this Monday morning.

My day-to-day job sees my flying a desk for a major garment company. I play low man on the totem pole. Naturally, when one of our factories is looking for a fall guy to cover for sliding deliveries, they come to me. I'm still green enough that I don't see completely through the wool they pull over my eyes, but not so much that I don't know that something's going on.

I maintain that I'm not there to play politics but just to do my job. To me that's simple, but apparently to want to just do my job doesn't cut it. I needed to fabricate some career aspirations for my recent performance evaluation paperwork and now came this, this, annoyance. I'd let it ruin my day, but when it comes time to go home I leave my business in my cubicle, because it's just that: business.

I won't deny that the intrigue gets tiresome and the games tedious. As long as I recognize that people are up to something, though, I will survive. And I am making a buck or two along the way. I just would like to know if they're setting me up for more responsibility or an ulcer.

How quickly the quarters pass. Why, it seems like just three months ago our head honchos gathered us together at work and told us how "strikingly mediocre" the business was doing. A lots of words were said this time around, and most of them positive. I've never gotten quite the hang of business words, I guess, because to me "execute" means "kill", not just "do", and "architect" and "hindsight" are nouns, not verbs.

But I'm not a business man by trade, just by chance, and maybe I missed out on some grammar reeducation somewhere along the way.

On my way home from work I dropped in on a focus group to try out some new sausage, or something. When I got there, though, it became aware that I wasn't needed. Since I showed up, though, they paid me the same compensation as if I'd participated. Now that's what I call business.

And the vanity license plate du jour? GUTN TOG, spotted on the back of a VW Passat.