When technology fails
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I had to give a presentation the other day. It was your garden variety slide show, video conferenced between two cities. The laptop was hooked into the conferencing system, and could be switched with the camera. We could see the other room and the slide show. The other room could see either the slide show or us, at my control. No biggie, right?
Except the guy setting up the communications couldn't get the system to send the images of the presentation to the other room's display. So, the solution he comes up with includes rigging the laptop to a projector to display the slides on a mylar screen, and have the rear camera in our room show the image of the screen on the remote system. (Anyone got a wooden table?)
On the slides with 3 bullet points, it was actually workable. Then came the 'detail' slide. You know, the one filled with details in 10-point type, when you tell everyone to look at their printouts? Only the folks at the other end didn't bring their printouts, and I was rigged to the projector, and so couldn't e-mail the presentation to their laptops.
The folks at the other end would up standing 6 inches from the remote monitor trying to read what was on the mylar screen.
*sigh*
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The real WTF is that he didn't print them out, put them on a wooden table...
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... took a picture, emailed that picture, opened in on another Windows machine, projected it on a screen, have a camera record that screen and pipe the output back to the original computer.
"What's that?"
"It looks like a sock."
"Could be a 'W'."
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the real WTF is that details were put on a slide at all - slides are for overviews, not details. abusing powerpoint in that manner is -10 uncool and would have caused me to fail many presentations i've given in classes.
