Slippery Stuff

Is there something important to know about pride? Yes, that's it, it is closely associated with the great banana skin on the path of life. Now, recently I have done some presentations at some big meetings, and I have been filming for Sky again. And the fact that people kept telling me that I am actually quite good was rather going to my head. To be fair, I realised this and was thinking I had better be careful. Unfortunately it appears that thinking you should be careful and actually being careful turn out to be completely different things. So there I was yesterday ready to give a talk to an international group. I had been playing around with the presentation the night before as I wanted to add a few of my own photos to showcase (OK, so double problem here, rather proud of some of my photos as well). Not that the presentation was about photography, but I was able to add some of my sheep and cattle photos. That morning I had brought in my memory stick and transfered the presentation over to the main computer. I started off with my presentation, and briefly thought my agenda on the first screen was slightly longer than I meant, but I continued on. I hit a series of slides which, while roughly appropriate, I had thought I had taken out. I continued. I got to the final slide and then announced to the group something along the lines of "damn, you know what, I just gave you the wrong presentation". I had suddenly realised that I had just run the entire way through the presentation written for the International Sheep Congress the week before. Both had been on Bluetongue which was why I had been able to continue, and why it came out of my mouth so smoothly, but the take home messages of the two talks were supposed to be extremely different. I had completely failed to cover the particular points required for the meeting. Which would rather explain why people had been looking at my print outs with confusion (the print outs had been taken from the earlier version without my photos and so were correct). While I rescued the situation by going through the print out and discussing the important missed slides I have to say that I was fairly mortified as I have NEVER done that before.

A few lessons to learn, along with don't be proud. Firstly, as part of the title include the name of the meeting the talk is intended for. Both presentations had very similar names hence I had managed to transfer the wrong one. Secondly, run through the presentation quickly once transfering it. This I usually do but didn't in this case because we couldn't see how to blank the projector in the room and I was too cocky to worry about it. Thirdly, should I start thinking that the presentation has the wrong slide in it then I should listen to myself rather than blithely charging onward. And fourthly, there's nothing like a good cock up to bring you sharply back down to earth.