So, there I was, landed with this ‘prez the wire’ gig. Yeah, another presentation. Just what everyone wants, right? To sit through me trying to explain some tech thing. But orders are orders, or something like that, so I had to get on with it.
I started digging into this ‘Wire’ stuff. At first glance, it seemed pretty straightforward. You know, like many of these tools do when you just read the shiny brochure. ‘Oh, this won’t be so bad,’ I told myself. Famous last words.
The more I poked at it, the more tangled it all seemed. It wasn’t just about understanding it for myself; how the heck was I supposed to make this make sense to a roomful of people who probably had a dozen other things on their minds? It felt like trying to untangle a massive knot of fishing line that had been chewed by a dog.
My first attempts at putting some slides together? Absolute trash. Seriously. I’d create something, look at it the next morning, and think, ‘What on earth is this mess?’ Too much jargon I was trying to avoid, diagrams that looked like a spider fell in an ink pot and crawled across the page. Useless. I wouldn’t have understood it myself if someone else showed it to me.
I spent a good few evenings just staring at my screen, moving boxes around, deleting text, then adding it back. It was frustrating. Really frustrating. I thought about just calling in sick on presentation day.
Then, I guess out of sheer desperation more than genius, it kinda clicked. I was trying too hard to cover every single little detail, trying to show I’d done my homework. But nobody cares about that. They care about what it means for them. ‘Stop trying to sound smart,’ I told myself. ‘Just show them what it is, what problem it might solve, and give them a super simple example.’
So, I basically scrapped almost everything I had. Started over. I focused on one or two key problems we’ve all grumbled about in the past, and then showed how this ‘Wire’ thing could, maybe, make those specific pains a little less painful. Short and sweet. Or, at least, shorter and less confusing. That was the goal, anyway.
I even practiced it. Out loud. To my cat. He didn’t look impressed, but then again, he rarely is. It still felt clunky in parts. I kept tripping over certain phrases. But it was better than the academic lecture I nearly cooked up.
Presentation day rolled around. I stood up there, clicked through my simplified slides. Some folks nodded, some just stared, a few were definitely checking their phones under the table – standard procedure, really. I got through it. There were even a couple of questions at the end, which I guess means at least two people were listening. Or maybe they were just being polite. Hard to tell.
Looking back, this whole ‘prez the wire’ business was a proper pain, not gonna lie. But here’s the kicker: being forced to explain it actually made me understand it a whole lot better myself. If you can’t break something down simply, you probably don’t get it as well as you think you do. So, yeah, that’s what I got out of it. A headache, and a slightly better grasp of ‘Wire’. And the relief that it’s over. For now.
