October 2011 Archives

Every intern and new contract graphic artist that comes to work with us gets a sound clobbering by PowerPoint sometime during the first few months.

You think you're a fresh-grad/veteran/whatever, designer rock-star with your Adobe Creative Suite powers, but we warned you there would be PowerPoint jobs mixed in there too. And you were like 'Hey, no-prob! Not my favorite program, but everybody's gotta do it--bring it on!' and I still cringed on your behalf, waiting and wondering which job was going to nuke your confidence and throw chunks of the team into an hours-long tizzy.

And so, I spent three-quarters of my day today helping clean up the latest deadline-enmeshed PowerPoint trainwreck while trying to exude calmness to the project managers frustrated by the disaster. There's no telling which candy-coated Microsoft land mine is going to demolish the 30 to 150 bullet-riddled pages the artist spent days coaxing into cohesion, but the reconstructive surgery is never easy. Ever.

Always wishing we could migrate our clients to PDF presentations. But. It'll never happen.

The four of us were driving back home tonight and Giselle was describing their current biology assignment: diagramming cell anatomy on a poster. And I mused, "ohhh golly, next step after that will be all the cell division stages and types....meiosis...mitosis...tuburculosis..."

Giselle jumps in, "--no wait, tuburculosis? Isn't that where they take out the thingamahoogies in the back of your neck?"

Me: "Thingamahoogies???"

To which Harrison clarifies, "--that's tonsils, Giselle...tonsils..."

"ohhhh yeahhhh, tonsilectomy...DON'T MOCK ME!"