The names in the PowerPoint slide have been deleted to protect the egotistical.

If you are over 15% of the way through your presentation and you are still on your introductions (AND NOT EVEN THE INTRODUCTION) you are wasting my time and wasting the time of everyone who took part of their day to listen to you assholes.

Look, it’s simple.  The introduction to a presentation should do three things.  First, you need to get the audience engaged in your topic (something snappy or compelling or something we can relate to).  Second, you should build a little credibility (called ethos for those of you into the whole Aristotelian thing).  Finally, you should give us a thesis for your presentation and tell us the main points you wish to discuss.  We are more than seven minutes into this presentation and you are still chuckling at each other and saying thanks to the audience.  This is not how you give a presentation!

BAD! BAD! BAD!  I hate you and your desire to perpetuate everything all of us peons hate about presentations and webinars.  The worst part is that science hasn’t discovered a way for me to climb through a wormhole in my monitor so I can wring your neck.

You know what the audience wants?

They want you to shut about your damn selves and get on with the presentation.  We don’t need to hear about Twitter hashtags, every job you’ve ever had and how we should talk about this presentation on LinkedIn.  We don’t!  If you have a good presentation people will talk about it.  If you have a crappy one, and I think that’s where this is going, I’m going to talk about what a freaking idiot you are.  So encouraging me to talk about your presentation is giving me license to mock you to the world.  I hope you are happy.

Giving this presentation means you probably aren’t good at sales, but people seem to think you are pleasant and make a decent PowerPoint, but you actually don’t because we are trained as a society to accept and even encourage shitty presentations.  In other words, we are enabling this crap and it makes me crazy.

People like you are as annoying as being told a movie starts at 8:15 but at 8:45 we are still seeing commercials for popcorn and Coke and those same three goddamn trivia questions.  OH MY GOD WHY CAN’T THEY GIVE US MORE THAN THREE QUESTIONS???

But I digress.

Keep it simple AND brief.  Most of us aren’t great orators, but decent content can make it all better.  Seriously!  Do those three things in the introduction I talked about earlier and get on with your presentation.  The more things you say the less your audience will remember.  Don’t stretch a 30 minute presentation into 45 because either you like the sound of your voice or you are too lazy to be organized.  Your audience will appreciate you for it.

Please! I don’t want my obituary to read “He died doing what he hated, having an aneurysm while watching another crappy PowerPoint presentation.”