10 Worst Presentation Moments
While procrastinating from finishing up my TechEd talks in my hotel room here in NZ, I came across this really funny link of a Microsoft UK employee's "Ten Worst Presentation Moments" that had me laughing out loud.
One of my own "interesting experiences" occurred about 9 years ago at a PDC conference. It was the first time I had ever presented as a Microsoft employee, and it was to ~2400 people. I was doing a joint-presentation with another presenter and the plan was that he'd present the first part of the talk for 60 minutes, and then I'd do the second part of it for another 30 minutes. When we got going he unfortunately got spooked, though, and starting speaking super, super, super fast.
After watching this awhile I tried to help calm him down by subtly passing him a note that said "you are going too fast -- slow down". Unfortunately he misread it as "you are not going fast enough -- speed up" -- at which point his pace (which was already so fast you could barely understand anything) really, really increased. It got to the point where he was spending no more than 2-4 seconds on a slide (and even skipping over some to save time). Finally he got to the end-slide of his presentation, apologized profusely to the audience that he had run so late, and handed it over to me. We were 9 minutes into the presentation. The next 81 minutes was a very, very long time for me. :-)
Scott
P.S. Now I need to go back to work and finish up my LINQ presentation for Tuesday....