Funny business 21: Public speaking

“How does one succeed in public speaking? Why, by bullshitting of course.” ~Project partner, final year.

I spent 6 months working on my final year engineering project. Pulled an all nighter before the formal presentation and survive on nothing but 3 hours of sleep each day for the week before that. Double, triple and quadruple checked the power point presentation before heading off to the auditorium with nothing but adrenaline and caffeine to keep me awake.

It didn’t matter that only 2 out of the 6 people in the group pulled their weight and hauled ass. It didn’t matter that before that day, I was an unshaven mess who’ve been holed up with the robot for the previous 2 months. I shaved, greased up the straws on my head, slapped on some wrinkled suit and tied the geeky tie. I went on stage that day, knowing my stuff inside out, in order to bitch slap that presentation to ashes and I did exactly what I set out to do. I was happy and I slept for almost 24 hours afterwards.

Mind you, it wasn’t a smooth ride. No, not at all. The TA’s laptop couldn’t read our 100MB large power point presentation back then (We were using Pentium 900Mhz if I remember correctly, so the laptop must’ve been some 200Mhz variety) and we were scheduled to present first. When we brought this problem to the professor he simply said: “This is a real world problem and the project tests you in real world scenarios. You either deal with it, or you lose your time slot.”

So, me being me, I decided to use Plan B. (Being an engineer, I always have 3 fail safes for important events.) I reshuffled our presentation order so I can go first while the rest of the group struggle with our TA’s sucky laptop in order to fix it. I happened to have a small working version of my part and some neat Javascript demo of how our robot will go through the obstacle course. Since the team members couldn’t fix the laptop in time, I then spread paper copies of our 100 page slides to the key people and continued. Like I said, nothing is going to stop me from doing what I set out to do that day.

“I felt the same way today.”

It always feels a bit rough, like you have insomnia. The invisible stress wall created by the presentation day manifests its power over my life in subtle and destructive ways. Cleaning, grooming, organization, and sleep. All suffered under the desire for a perfect execution. But that is only because I wanted to be good at it, not because my boss wanted me to do it. This is the reasoning I use to justify spending personal off work hours at home to go through the power points and with imaginary audiences in my living room.

“I wondered if Steve Jobs still practices his presentations.”

Now that the ordeal is over with, I feel much relieved. I couldn’t motivate myself to do anything before the deadline, but found renewed energy to clean up afterwards. The 20 hours sleep I had must’ve helped as well. But most importantly of all, I feel the need to be with people. It seemed only yesterday that it was still February, in the blink of an eye, I’ve dedicated almost two months to it without knowing. Time is moving faster…

“MY MIND IS SLOWING DOWN”