Dear Steven,
I was asked to make a presentation today. It’s always nice to be wanted. I was asked to talk about the use of cleaning products in the work place, a topic that you know I hold dear to my heart. I spent a lot of time making the slides. I wanted it to be perfect. Just the right balance of pictures and text. The perfect presentation. Just enough animation to make my point, but not so much that people would be put off. I was up all night. It was a wonder … a true beauty to behold. And I memorized the speech as well. I had jokes, anecdotes, thought provoking points. It was exciting, funny, emotional. You name it, it was in the speech. You’d be hard pressed to find a better speech in any TED forum or university lecture hall. It was one of those things that are so good, you can say, “Ok. I can die now. My life is complete.” I got to the hall early. I didn’t want to get anything wrong. I found the computer they had set up and loaded my presentation. It all worked. I checked it twice. Then I sat down and waited for everyone else to come in. We started. We sang some hymns first. I hadn’t expected that. A lot of people were crying. Other people talked. I was really nervous and didn’t listen much. Then it was my turn. I set all my cleaning products out on this strange table and got going. It was a flop! Nobody laughed at my jokes. Not a single person! Even the one about how the TV shows were wrong and you could clean up blood from a crime scene! Then they dragged me out. I wasn’t even halfway through. Somebody kept yelling something about “fun-eral”! I mean, what is a “fun-eral” anyway? I didn’t have any fun! They threw my cleaning products at me and I never even got my USB back. All that work! Not going there again.
Your friend,
Kevin