Wednesday at work I was given the task to throw a small presentation together to teach our Systems Engineering team how to work with the program I helped create this summer. The list of invites was about five people including myself. Not a problem I though to myself, I figured I would just lead a discussion, print off some code, and work through it. So I reserved a small room and printed off some code and thought I was good to go.
The next day at my weekly software meeting, my mentor slash software lead decided that she wanted to go and also thought all the software people should go too. She’d get me a list of people to invite. I left the meeting in a state of shock. Now my small meeting of five guests jumped to fifteen people, and instead of leading a discussion I would be lecturing. Many of you may think the idea of me talking an hour straight would be cake, but lord was I scared. I have never given a presentation that would take an hour before, and I have never done one this large by myself either.
I go back to my desk and sit there with my mind in complete disarray. Contemplating what injury I could fake to get out of doing this, or how I could hand this off to the other co-op. My mentor soon appears, she says “I have good news” I thought to myself maybe the entire software team has acquired an odd African flu, but instead what she gave me raised my anxiety meter by about a factor of ten, it was the list of invites and not only did it cover the Software team and the systems team, but also had the hardware team and the managers all listed on it. Now I had to present in front of the people that signed my paychecks, great…
So around four o’clock after frantically cleaning up my software so that there were no visible bugs when I was supposed to present, I began working on my presentation. I suffered massive writers block on more than on occasion but managed to finish everything by ten that night. I couldn’t stop telling myself how much it sucked and how I was going to be make the biggest ass of myself tomorrow. I am a pro at that after all.
I go home spend an hour messing around crash wake up at 6:30 and come back in to work to do all my last minute prep work. I print off all the documents (approximately 500pages of material total), and finally get in to the conference room I have reserved about five minutes before it all starts. Five minutes prep is all I need right? Wrong! The computer in the room wouldn’t log on, despite my valiant attempts of banging, screaming, crying, and unplugging stuff. So as people start arriving I quickly run out and steal a laptop that I am pretty sure was older than the Bush administration. I get back and the room was packed, I have no idea how many people were there. I plug the laptop in and after it spends about ten minutes booting up. I load up my presentation and off I went.
Here’s the basic summary, despite my original thoughts after I finished, I was flipping awesome. Everyone loved it, my managers thought I did a great job, my mentor thought I was hilarious, despite my zero attempts at being funny. I was astonished. I never would have expected as much positive feed back as I got. Every once in a while I guess shit just pulls together and works out for the best