A Brief Whine

My boss is a pretty verbose guy. He spews forth words like a little volcano of vocabulary. He also likes to put things in writing where at all possible; memos, buck-slips, emails, documents indicating progress on a project, that sort of thing. He’s just never brief, is my point.

Usually these things are a case of him talking into a Dictaphone and me transcribing it, with a cackle, into Microsoft Word. Nice and easy. I type fast and really, a chimp could do that stuff. Occasionally though, he demands a cover note or slide for a PowerPoint presentation. This is fine in theory. I am more than coherent in PowerPoint.

He, however, is not.

For a start, he does not comprehend that you can not fit an infinite amount of words onto one PowerPoint slide – at least not unless you want a font size of minus 300 and are planning on handing out free magnifying glasses and an aneurysm with the presentation. He will hand me tapes full of words that would fill three single-spaced pages of Word and expects this all to fit concisely onto one slide. This is the world he lives in. Despite the obvious faces of disgust I pull when asked to do this, he doesn’t see what my problem is. I don’t have a magic wand, Dark Überlord, that’s what. My name is not Hermione Granger.

I actually like working in PowerPoint. You can do some neat stuff in there - like the time I made a presentation of all the people I hated at my last job. I made mean yet oddly accurate cartoons of everyone, captioned them all, wrote some scathing text detailing their various levels of assholity, made some graphs and pie charts (because no presentation is complete without some mathematical goodness) and synched up appropriate music. Every time Cruella de Ville, for example, would appear on the screen, that song “Bitch” by Meredith Baxter would start up. It was quite excellent! I couldn’t find a song about crusty old procrastinating douchebags for Mr. Panty-Waist so he had to make do with Carly Simon's “You’re so Vain”. And the Primitives’ “Really Stupid”.

Honestly it was a classic. When it was finished, I brought it in early one morning on my laptop along with some doughnuts and coffee, so that I and my good friends The Evil Queen and Timo could have a locked-door screening in Timo’s office where we ate, drank and gave copious amounts of "The Finger" when necessary, which turned out to be every five seconds on average. Who knew therapy could be as cheap as six doughnuts and some caffeine?

So you see, PowerPoint can be your friend.

Not for my current boss however. Mr. “I would like twenty different bullet points in one document”. Mr. “I have diarrhea of the verbal variety”. Oh no.