More of Just What Everyone Needs

Looking through the various applications available on Facebook, not that I need any, just more out of curiosity as to what people could possibly want to spruce up pages that already seem a little busy, I found the perfect application for people one hates or, at least for whom one has a certain minimum amount of good old fashioned ill will.

First, I must say that I have sat through numerous unrecoverable hours of my life in various meetings, all of which seemed deliberately designed to put to a slow and torturous death any mental life within a radius of 100 miles. Once I was at a state-mandated all-day meeting, the point of which was to tell us how to hold brief, successful meetings. In my job as the community service labor supervisor for this agency, it was not my custom to call the community service guys in for a meeting. My job was to get them out to the city and state parks and get them to clean them up. That didn't take much meeting time; in fact, all it usually took was an explanation that failure to complete community service hours meant time in jail. Anyway, our "facilitator" at this meeting basically had one message which was that it is a good idea to plan your meeting with others, necessitating, of course what I suppose professional "facilitators" would call a pre-meeting. Hearkening back to the paradoxes of Zeno, I asked where the pre-meetings would end and was met by a blank, unknowing stare. I mean, it simply makes sense that to have a meeting requiring a pre-meeting, the pre-meeting should likewise be preceded by a pre-pre-meeting, ad infinitum, ad absurdum.

Some of the worst meetings to which I have been subjected are the ones that are dominated by the PowerPoint demonstration. What tortured soul in the depths of hell came up with PowerPoint and what demented Prometheus saw fit to give this knowledge to man? I hope his vulture is working overtime ripping out pieces of his hopefully cirrhotic liver as I sit here thinking about it.

PowerPointers all seem to operate under the illusion that their audiences are solely made up by the illiterate and the vision-impaired. Projecting a slide upon the screen, they will read, exactly as it appears, every word of text on that slide and without further elucidation, will proceed to the next. Suppose your PowerPointer has just read through Slide A and has gotten to Slide B. For fun, about halfway through the reading of Slide B, ask a question about Slide A. This will have your PowerPointer skipping back to the previous slide, reading it over and, once again, proceeding without further elucidation. PowerPoint is just one of those tools that makes people feel that since they have done something, they have accomplished something. The accomplishment they feel and the actual results usually are two different things.

This wonderful application I have found for Facebook is a way for folks to share their favorite PowerPoint slides. As a public service, I will include no further information about this application in the hope that people will not be further tempted to give it a try. If you do decide to go down that highway of sin and shame, please don't send it to me. As Huck Finn said about Aunt Polly's plan to "sivilize" him, "I can't stand it. I been there before."