Suits
I've been having a rare excursion into the world of masculine posturing: in my normal line of business if you start demonstrating how far you can piss up a wall people tend to shake their heads and walk away. I don't think I've ever spent two days with a bunch of execs (and paid attention) before, individually I'm sure they are all nice boys and kind to their mothers, but collectively, and especially when they were presenting, there was a depressing tendency to dis first and ask questions later. I was their technical minder; up 'til now I have successfully avoided the wonderful world of PowerPoint. I can still remember the queues of suits at M****soft, A*di, Ba**r and a few dozen more conferences, inserting their carefully crafted presentations into the show computer, only to have their technical malfeasances cruelly exposed. Some would try to duck the problem by arriving two minutes before they were due to present (or prevent as one Mr Malaprop could't stop saying today), others would do the opposite and stress over minutiae, hours beforehand, clogging the system. It wouldn't matter, they'd dry, or forget what their six hundred slides were all about, and somewhere along the line they'd just have to communicate or die.I think the biggest trap seems to come from interfacing apple and microsoft: my first presentation had a series of embedded video interviews, filmed on an iPhone, unfortunately they all presented with the subjects rotated through 90 degrees, there was literally nothing to be done in the two minutes available. Even the timely collapse of the suspended ceiling couldn't rescue this one, it's a feature of business hotels that everything costs extra, so we didn't have Internet access (£15.00/hour!), and couldn't bail him out (if every conceivable version of media playback and useful program was installed onto a show machine, it would grind to a halt before you pressed go, they tend to be very minimally equipped with software, to keep the speed up). Nevertheless most people were ok, even if they came preloaded with useful maxims ('less is more' was notably absent), why use one slide when ten will do.
There was a common theme that I identified; there is no problem so huge that cannot be resolved by the right process engineer within three weeks, given that this was an oil industry gig, I have my doubts (based on past performance), but no doubt my misgivings would be given as evidence in support of their arguments.
On a fashion note, Oil bods aren't quite as dull as pharmaceuticals or cars, although the Europeans or Asians don't have enough confidence to dress like tits, as the murcans do. There was one particularly racy individual who combined a grey M&S business suit #001 with two tone cuban heel brogues, but generally speaking rebellion was limited to whether or not one wore a tie.
posted by Lampy @ 9/27/2012 05:36:00 pm
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