Oh no ....... please don't do this to me again!

Oh Lordy Lordy. I've had to put on the cloak of hypocrisy again. I've had to do the whimpering, pathetic commitment-dodging escape. I've been obliged to do the "Gosh! Isn't this an interesting item in the conference folder !" eye-avoidance tactic. I've had to try and steer myself to the safe waters of anonymity from the stormy seas of hideous public embarrassment. And I'd thought those days were over.
The occasion was a conference in, shall we say the not-too-distant past. The venue, a large one, amid the exhibitors. The audience, aware and interested. The subject, topical. The expectations, high. The presenter .......... a colleague.
Yes, I was at the back of the room for another of those occasions when a colleague displayed their feet of presentational clay. I'm maybe - I admit the "maybe" reluctantly, and without a great deal of conviction - not the best of presenters myself, but even I know the elementary PowerPoint traps. They're the same as the overhead projector traps used to be, but with a few more technological bells and whistles, and even more opportunities to turn a potentially interesting presentation into and exercise in involuntary euthanasia. Oh, dear, I shouldn't still be embarrassed by colleagues who don't know this. It's not kind, at my age.
Look, first of all, PowerPoint is not an autocue device. It cannot be mistaken for a notebook. It is totally unlike a pack of postcards. Consequently, presenters (I feel I'd better move into the third person plural, in order to avoid the ever present risk of identifying the 50% of the population within which my colleague is demographically located) should not READ from the damn slides. They should not plod through every word projected on the screen, dully, forgetting that the entire tone of one's voice when reading is completely different to the tone of voice of an enthusiastic, engaging, presenter. The famous Mehrabian study suggested ( and is widely misrepreented) that a rotten tone of voice wastes 38% of the potential impact of the message.
To read aloud from the slide also necessitates either looking at the laptop in front of the presenter, creating an eye line that does not engage with the audience, thus giving the distinct impression of shiftiness (for it is not for nothing that we have that expression "he couldn't even look me in the eye" for someone who is generally shifty, dubious, and not to be trusted) or, and I realise this is a long sentence, treating the audience to a view of the back, or at best side of the head, possibly replete with ear whiskers, if indeed one is of the gender with which ear whiskeration is generally associated. And to return to the Mehrabian figures, "Kapow! Shazam! There goes another 55% of the potential impact of the presentation!" No, PowerPoint slides are NOT for reading aloud.
Of course, reading aloud is not the only crime of the appalling presenter, and alas, not the only sin I witnessed that morning. Take that old nonsense, "A picture is worth a thousand words", the excuse for clip-art since the term was coined. Oh yeah? If one does an internet image search for the term "man in office" one will find 26,100 images in 0.21 seconds. So why in the name of Monty Python and all their office sketches do we have to be subjugated, (for it is subjugation), to those wretched morph-stick men on the slides? You know the ones. Nasty little dark, partially inflated, slightly sinister characters that seem to have a lifetime lease on the bottom right hand corner of PowerPoint slides. Particularly insidious is the one that is standing there, hand on hip perhaps, other hand gesturing to the text, as if to say, "Yea, take unto yourself these words of wisdom!". A most unpleasant little creature.
Need I go on? We have all suffered the manifold horrors of PowerPoison. There is the "fader game" - in which the presenter plays with the animation function, and the audience desperately tries to hang on to a semblance of sanity as the screen constantly dissolves into squares, stripes, and chequerboards. A subset is the rotten "typewriter" effect, with or without sound, or any other similar animation trick that annoys the audience.
By no means finally, for the artistic presenter, putting aside the question of whether an "artistic presenter" would use PowerPoint at all, there is the "all-comers international font challenge", the self-anointed winner being the presenter who has managed to use the largest number of unsuitable fonts on a single slide, or to change the fonts most frequently between slides, allowing the audience to wonder how many different presentations had been cobbled together to produce the particular event they are witnessing, and if cobbled together from such scraps, what does that say about the importance of the event to the presenter, and the respect the presenter has for the audience? All of which detract the audience from the M*E*S*S*A*G*E.
So it was, after being subjected to what counted as an exemplar of truly awful misuse of PowerPoint, I found myself concealing my "speaker" badge with its give-away organisational information, and sneaking away from the audience into the exhibition proper. PowerPoint has been around the best part of a twenty years, and one's colleagues really should not embarrass one with their still rotten presentation skills.