How not to be prepared for a presentation

I had a visit from our ven­ues coordin­ator this after­noon, need­ing a Mac­book Pro to VGA con­nector, I was happy to oblige. This was shortly fol­lowed by a phone to help the presenter get the pro­jector to dis­play prop­erly. Arriv­ing at lec­ture theatre I found:

• In addi­tion to no Power­book to VGA adaptor, luck­ily the Mac­book Pro one fitted.
• The presenter had not idea how to use mul­tiple dis­plays on their Powerbook.
• There was min­imal bat­tery charge, (it was show­ing 10 minutes when I arrived) and the presenter did not bring their power adapter with them. A Mac­Book Pro power adapter will not fit a PowerBook.
• The present­a­tion con­sisted of a bunch of JPEGs (a very strange choice) stored on the Power­Book hard drive only.
• The presenter’s only port­able data stor­age was a USB stick that did not have enough free space for all the images that was required to be ret­rived from the Power­Book. And before I man­age to get my USB stick the Powerbook’s bat­tery was flat.

Luck­ily for the presenter there was some time before the present­a­tion to begin and they were last seen head­ing to their office to get another copy of the images which where going to have to be presen­ted on a PC laptop.

I would not think of doing a present­a­tion without all the cables, remotes, power adapter etc. that I might need and a copy of my present­a­tion on a USB stick in both key­note and pdf format.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 10:20 pm and is filed under presentations . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.