The ten worst presentation moments No matter how bad you think your presentation has been, take some comfort from the fact that at least it wasn't as bad as these stories…
I was due to present to the Belgian management team of an international IT company. Not wishing to be the typical Brit presenting in English, I carefully prepared and turned up with a French presentation and proceeded to present 45 minutes in French. (I meant it as a surprise so hadn't warned anyone.) We broke halfway through my presentation for coffee and the country manager asked me if I would switch to English. "Is my French that bad?" I said. "No," he replied, "it's just that we are all from the Dutch speaking part of Belgium and we are not clear whether you are trying hard or just insulting us." Presenter: "Can you hear me OK at the back?" Anonymous Aussie voice from the back: "Yep, but I'll gladly swap with someone who can't." I once had to run out of a meeting room, across the corridor and into the men's loo to shut off my co-presenter's radio microphone as he was, err…, availing himself of the facilities there. Those radio mic's have a surprisingly long range… In the late 1990s I was asked to give a presentation to a group of people from a Government Agency. I didn't want to carry all of my presentation equipment, so I asked for a projector and PowerPoint to be provided. I then turned up ready to give the presentation with my presentation on a floppy disk. In the meeting room was a 35mm slide projector. The meeting organiser pointed to the corner and said in a somewhat insulted tone,"There is the power point; we do have electricity here – we are not that backward." I once attended a customer presentation with 200 people in audience where the presenter forgot to switch off their wireless connection and Instant Messaging (IM). Half way through the presentation, the IM notification window popped up… "Wet Patch has just signed in." Language translation is handled differently at international conferences. I attended one in Paris where a French speaker would stand next to the English speaker, wait for them to pause, and translate what the speaker had just said; the speaker would then continue. A friend of mine was giving a presentation and he got a little carried away with his desire to communicate. He couldn't speak French but desperately wanted to empathise with the audience. His presentation started just as it would have done in the UK but as time went on and his need to empathise increased he started affecting a French accent. It was subtle at first and he was completely unaware of what he was doing but as the presentation progressed, the accent got stronger until by the end he sounded more and more like Inspector Clouseau or an extra in 'Allo 'Allo. A UK sales person travelled to Oslo to make a presentation to a large Norwegian bank. He was presenting from a lectern complete with a glass of water which he sipped to keep his throat clear. About a third of the way through the presentation the water ran out, so he walked over to get some more from a nearby table. Unfortunately the air in Oslo is very dry during the winter and this tends to cause a lot of static. As he walked back to carry on the presentation he put a finger on the keyboard and (I could hear the spark from the back of the room) blew the laptop to kingdom come. Some things are best left said only at home … At home, my family had an 'in-joke' about the "Tea Fairy". This was the invisible winged creature that seemed to always produce a cup of tea when my wife and son wanted one. That is to say, me, going unnoticed. I was giving a corporate presentation in the US and had flown over from the UK that morning. During the break I was standing next to the drinks and food, and found myself in a group with the new Sales Director. I decided to play the host, and went to offer everyone a cup of tea, but what came out of my jet-lagged mouth was "Shall I be Tea-Fairy?" In the horrible stunned silence that followed, my scrambled brain decided that the look on the director's face wasn't utter incomprehension and disbelief, but more of an "I'm sorry, can you explain what a Tea Fairy is?" So – with part of my brain screaming 'STOP' – I gave a little hop in the air and fluttered my eyes and arms (and eyebrows, I suspect) like I imagine any self-respecting tea-fairy would do. I went as the junior member of a team to do a new business presentation to a company in the City. Their offices were in a cobbled mews, and as I got out of the cab, the cobbles ripped the leather off the (high) heel of my shoe, and the torn leather was flapping as I walked. This didn't create a great impression, so when we got to reception, I asked the receptionist if she had any glue which might stick the leather back to the heel. She gave me some superglue, and a couple of minutes later, the job was done. I was the last in the team to present, and whilst I was waiting, listening to my colleagues, I stretched my feet out in front of me under the table, with the recently-glued heel resting on the (white 2-inch shag-pile) carpet of their boardroom. When it came to my turn to present, I tried to pull my feet back under me ready to stand up, only to find that one shoe was super-glued to the carpet. All I could do was yank at it until it came away – along with rather a large clump of long carpet fibres. I had to shuffle around the room with my heel facing outwards at all times, lest anyone see that I had half of the boardroom carpet attached to the back of my foot. When it came to us leaving, I left backwards, as if leaving royalty. The deference obviously worked - we got the business. I was giving a corporate presentation in Chicago one year, having flown across from the UK to deliver a controversial project proposal to a new sales group. I'd just finished reading a presentation guide that suggested only using images – no text or charts – on slides and I decided to put it into practice. Unfortunately, I was suffering from jet-lag, compounded by a lack of detailed notes, and I struggled to remember what the pictures were meant to symbolise. I spent a humiliating hour in front of twenty senior executives, saying things like, "err…. and that's a picture of …. hmmm … a chair … which … err ….." http://www.microsoft.com/uk/atwork/work/presentationdisasters.mspx
