Laura's Unfortunate Powerpoint Situation

The day: April 8, 2003.

The time: The morning; say, ten-ish?

The sitch: I had just completed the task I had set out for myself that morning-- attending a meeting followed by five minutes' discussion with my advisor about how I had nothing to do at school and should probably find something to do at school. Agreeing, I decided to head to a nearby computer to write a story or at the very least check my e-mail.

          I was disgruntled to find that, once again, the server was down, so I couldn't access any of my previous work. I wasn't that disgruntled, however, since none of my plans involved accessing previous work; however, if I did write a story, and the server didn't come back online while I was working on it, or the computer crashed, I would lose it forever. Right, then. E-mail it was.

          Further disgruntlement came in the form of my discovery that the Internet connection wasn't working, either. This is crippling to me, even more so than when my usual portal/e-mail server of LanceandEskimo.com is down. Everything I thought of to do was impossible: checking the message boards, writing a blog entry, reading notmydesk archives, surfing imdb for any upcoming movies starring Viggo Mortensen... All impossible! Whimpering like a lost puppy, I decided to go ahead with my original plan of writing a story, saving be damned. If worse came to worse I could always e-mail it to oh wait. Well, hopefully the server would come back online.

          But when I double-clicked on Word, I got an error message! I couldn't even open Word, for christ's sake. This was getting ridiculous. There were not other programs except for Adobe Acrobat Reader (useless without a pdf to read), Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Powerpoint. I doubted that those programs would work if Word didn't, but I double-clicked on Powerpoint, just to see. To my surprise and alarm, it worked! There was only one thing left to do.

          Make a powerpoint presentation.

          Forget the fact that I had nothing to write it about and no ideas. Forget the fact that I had no experience with Powerpoint beyond a presentation I had been forced to make in eighth grade (the science teacher assuming that we'd have to know Powerpoint in our later lives) on Annie Jump Cannon; or that I had no reason to use it, and no real hope of saving my product. There was nothing else that I could do, so I had to do that.

          Luckily, the next day I realized the reason the Internet didn't work was because someone had misappropriated the network cable, so I stole one from another broken computer and plugged it in. The server still didn't work, but lo and behold, the Internet did; and I was able to rescue my presentation from the desktop and e- mail it to myself at home.

This, my friends, is the product of a Tuesday morning's schoolwork. Please enjoy.