I was conned into doing a formal presentation for about 80 people the other day.
Normally, I’m quite happy with smaller team or client presentations to half a
dozen or a dozen people; the sudden scaleup put me in a mental state where (at
least to myself) I sounded like a crazed televangelist. Maybe it wasn’t that
bad in reality; some people even laughed a little at the
flying pig jokes and no
mouldy fruit was thrown.
The good news was that almost all of the technology worked perfectly. For
example, the normal experience of a tiny projector that sounds like a badly
maintained lawnmower was replaced by a huge bright fixed back-projection screen
that everyone could see clearly. No hunting around for books to prop the
projector up was required. No “where’s the remote, Bob?” conversations because
I brought my
own (I hate just standing behind the lectern). The exception was the sound
system: all the microphones seemed to be broken. I’m always a bit loud anyway,
so this wasn’t a problem.
If you’re curious, you can download a PDF copy of the presentation.
[2018-07-09: added a link to a PDF of the presentation. Added “identity”
tag.]
