36 Signs You Pulled this Presentation Together at the Last Minute
By: Sarah Cooper
Tags: Presentations, Procrastination, Satire, Humor, Meetings

1. You start with a 15-minute meditation, then stop for a 10-minute stretch break, and end with 20 minutes of silent introspection

2. Your co-presenter’s name is Lorem Ipsum

3. There’s a typo on the first slide. And all the other slides.

4. The handouts are still warm from the copy machine

5. You start by saying you want to keep this “very high level” which means you didn’t actually prepare anything

6. You pass around your phone for people to look at screenshots you forgot to add to the presentation

7. Every slide is just one word in a giant font

8. Every other slide is 5,000 words in a tiny font

9. Every other, other slide is an animated gif that has nothing to do with the topic

10.You ask if anyone has any questions before you’ve even started presenting anything, then when someone asks a question, you ask if anyone else knows the answer

11. You’ve put random memes of kittens, puppies, or babies to distract your audience from the fact that none of this makes any sense

12. You forgot to delete the contact information or bio of the coworker you “borrowed” the slides from

13. You are presenting your plan for Q3, but it says Q3 2014

14. None of your bullet styles match from one slide to the next

15. You have a bullet point list that includes:

***

TBD

Ask Mark for the latest numbers

**Add goal**

16. You tell everyone you prepared a lengthy PowerPoint but instead of showing it, you’d rather “hash it out” in an interactive discussion

17. You present for 5 minutes then turn it over to the group for “brainstorming”

18. You draw each slide in real time on the white board, spending lots of time picking the right color markers

19. You ask the audience what *they* think you should talk about

20. You accidentally project your desktop and it’s littered with screenshots you were taking up until right before you got up to present

21. You keep taking extended sips of water

22. You play a video that takes up 95% of your time

23. You stop presenting to re-arrange your slides mid-sesh

24. None of your graphs have an X or Y axis

25. The slide numbers are sometimes there, sometimes not, and definitely aren’t in order

26. Several slide layouts were obviously destroyed by the template when you pulled them in from another deck

27. You decide that, instead of what you were going to present, going around the room and sharing what everybody did over the weekend would be a better use of time

28. You keep asking the one person who knows anything to “back you up here” which amounts to doing your presentation for you

29. You tell a lengthy story about your childhood and, at the last minute, try to relate it back to what you were supposed to be talking about

30. You need to be frequently reminded about what you were supposed to be talking about

31. You brought a prop

32. Your presentation is a Google Doc of random ideas you wrote down in your previous meeting

33. You navigate to different social media sites for a “live demo” but end up just scrolling through posts

34. You say you really can’t start without a certain person who’s not there, then you decide to cancel altogether

35. You ask a co-worker to control the slides for you, and when they ask why your slides are blank, you say they must have “messed something up”

36. Right before you start, you say you have to run to the bathroom, and you never come back

Mucho thanks for the hilarious contributions from Laura, Molly, Christina, Stacy, Tia, Peipei, Ragan, Wayne, Michaela, Antonella and Jeff