Prime
Analogue in a digital world
I was invited to share my expertise with a certain group of professionals and I happily agreed. I was to submit my presentation and so a brainwave struck me. Instead of using boring old PowerPoint, why not go online and really wow them using a different presentation software?
And so I did. I opened the software. It asked me to choose a template from those available. I saw one with text boxes in the form of little cloud shapes— cute! I began to copy-paste my text into the cloud shapes and that is where all my troubles began.
Some of the cloud shapes had a mind of their own, rearranging themselves and zooming in and out like cheeky toddlers. After an hour of frustration I decided to try something different.
Brethren, I failed.
The slides in the new template seemed possessed by some malevolent force. When I clicked on slide 1 it would lead me to slide 18. When I clicked on slide 3 it would turn up blank, despite my painstaking copy-pasting. This entire process took me two precious hours.
Like a village dog limping home after losing a fight, I humbly returned to good old PowerPoint and had my presentation ready in 15 minutes. No fancy shapes, no enticing colours, just basic font on a basic background.I also want to confess that Microsoft Excel and I are sworn enemies. Just seeing the forbidding, undecipherable mathematical symbols on the toolbar makes me feel unwell.
Please have empathy for us older folk navigating this new digital world. Yes, it is still new for those of us who grew up using telephones that you actually had to turn all the way to one end to dial. Now, with gray hairs peeping out of our foreheads, employers expect us to start hawking things online while looking for people to ‘follow’ us, as if we were starting a cult.
Let’s not even talk about how trying to make people interested in a product you yourself have very little interest in, but need to earn a paycheck from, is the work of seven donkeys combined.
I’m just an analogue dinosaur!
