PowerPoint Slide Show Hell (12th circle)

This morning there was a presentation for the entire office. Everything wrong with companies seemed to come to light at it.
The first indication of impending doom was that it was between 9:30 and 12:00 in the morning… for the people on the west coast. Here in Edmonton, it was 10:30 to 1:00. It is so nice to know that the management of the company thinks of the people in Edmonton, and their lunch hour.
Next item of doom was the video. It seems that the remote viewing software wasn’t up to snuff. So while we could see the desktop of the person giving the presentation, it was too large, so it appeared on the local computer in a scrolling window. So we could only see 2/3 of the PowerPoint slide show at a time. This wouldn’t have been so bad if it was a normal slide show. You know, the kind with lots of white space, seven lines of seven words each. No, our presenter decided that modern PowerPoint slide shows should have as much information crammed into each slide as possible. So we got to see the show with someone constantly scrolling around the window so we could see everything going on.
The biggest problem was that the presenter was in love with business-speak. The kind of language where you can recognize the words as English, but man was never meant to put them together like that. The entire thing was dull, dull, DULL! No one else could concentrate on it enough to figure out what was going on. A co-worker said he did his best to stay awake, but he couldn’t do it without making snide comments.
That’s the biggest benefit of being a satellite office. We can make comments that will never get back to the dark overlords at the home base.
Eventually I had enough and just left. I got some productive work done.
An email was sent out in the afternoon telling people how they should be acting at meetings. Listen, don’t leave, don’t play with electronics, show respect for the presenter. I’m sure parts were directed at me. However, part was directed at the president of our local office. He spent the entire presentation typing on his laptop. And he didn’t need to take notes because he had a copy of the slide show.
I heard later that some marketing people are doing all their work within PowerPoint. Storing all the information that is relevant to the entire project. This allows them to give a presentation at the drop of a hat. But it also means viewers are looking at a dump of information, much of which isn’t relevant.