Presentation Slam -- Part Deux

So there I was, a three floor drop in front of me, and the Avnet conference behind me, thinking, should I take the easiest route and do a swan dive off the balcony, or should I just turn around a give my three minute presentation?

You should know there were a few things working against me here. First, my boss at Message Partners had prepared the three slides I was going to speak on a week before, and he had done it quickly, and since then the speech I'd prepared had diverged quite considerably from the slides. So after I had committed my speech to memory, practicing it over and over again until I could say it doing cartwheels through Niagara Falls, but when I tried to do my presentation using the slides, everything came crashing down and I spoke like a stuttering fool.

Second, and biggest of all, was the word COMPLIANCE. I don't know what it was about that word, but everytime I came to that word, instead of compliance, I'd stumble, or say complaints, or say khaki pants, you name it, but when it came to that word, my brain simply would not COMPLY.

So there I was, perched at the baloncy with all these thoughts swirling around my head as the clock approached one. Screw it, I thought, I can always dive off the balcony later, so I turned around and headed into the conference.

And just like it's my habit, I was one of the first ones there. That's me to a T, always early or on time, as it actually takes me twice as much energy to even try to be late so why bother, and this was my first conference, which means I wasn't aware of Conference Time, which seems to run about three and a half minutes late.

Then it started. First up, Avnet gave their spiel, which was that they're now charging their ISVs to have access to all their sales channels, and the better the access the bigger the fee (whatever happened to the win-win of simply earning sales commissions?). And then it was presentation time, and the lady (speaking with total ease) said all 23 presenters had 3 minutes each, and if we went over by even a second we were going to get GONGED.

Uh oh, I thought, that's not how I planned it, I thought they'd give us at least 30 second to wrap up, but NO, they were gonna hold us hard to three minutes. So immediately I looked down at my notecards and started cutting stuff out.

The good thing was I'd be presenting 11th, which was perfect, 'cause I'd get to see what everyone else was doing while not having to wait too long to go. And as others started presenting, the first thing that struck me was, everyone is clearly nervous. Here I am, plenty of reason to be nervous, as it's my first presentation, but I'm watching salty old convention dogs stumbling and stuttering their way through, which immediatly put me at ease, as I figured I could do just as good as that.

Then I got the call, NEXT, and it was on. Things started smooth, which was essential, as a lot of my tricky words were right in the beginning, as I was there to discuss our joint project with IBM, and as IBM has so many products, anything you do with them, to differentiate from everything else, immediately becomes a word salad, and the word salad I had to say was: Our joint security solution with the IBM system p5 which is called the Network Email Security Express Solution. And I sailed past that, but there it was, straight up ahead, my iceberg in the name of COMPLIANCE.

I started to say it, COM...COMP, but of course I stumbled, it was my Achilles spiel, and my mind immediately went blank. I started to bring my right hand up, palm exposed, where, finally realizing that that word and I might never get along, I'd written COMPLIANCE in blue ink, but even before read it off my palm out it came, compliance...YES!

There, I did it, I'd made it past, which brought me to the fun part of my speech. I got to tell my joke, which was: I've read recently that a new a devastating virus is created every sixteen seconds, but I'm not too sure about that fact, as I did read it off a recent spam mail. Then I heard it, a laugh to my left, then another, and soon the room was full of light laughter. Hey, this is fun.

But as I got to the end, trouble. As I called for my final slide, the How to Buy Us slide, the MC lady said, Time's up. What, I thought, it can't be, what about my warning, what about my signal. Incredulous, all I said was, "Really?" and she replied, Yep, your time is up. I was shocked, I was surprised, and even worse, I was on a roll, so I blurted out DAMN!!!

Not the worst expletive, altogether, and I was lucky I didn't say anything worse, but as I walked off, more laughs, bigger laughs, my damn had gotten the biggest laugh of all. And alls well, as the couple of contacts I made at the conference look like they're going to pan out. Damn indeed.