PowerPoint Rant Costs Colonel His Job

twoallbeefpatties writes "Wired reports that a 61-year-old reservist in Afghanistan was fired from his job as a staff officer after writing a sardonic op-ed criticizing the daily briefings provided by his taskforce, portraying them as little more than a neverending stream of redundant PowerPoint slideshows. This came after attempts to reform the process by giving his superiors a presentation that, of course, included five PowerPoint slides." Maybe he should have presented it as an art project instead of a complaint.

Power Corrupts...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Power point corrupts absolutely

Jolly bad show, Colonel

[Rogerborg]

You're either with the gargantuan effort to move the drinks cabinet six inches closer to Kandahar [wikipedia.org], or you're with the terrorists.

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[kevinNCSU]

Not only that, he specifically called out his own position as having too many and himself as unproductive. I think any of us would get fired if we went to our boss and said: "We have WAY too many software engineers, I can't swing a dead cat around here without hitting one! And I should know, I've got nothing but time to swing dead cats around the office because I haven't been productive in TWO full months! And let me tell you, their no fucking good once you hit a software engineer with one cause the tail breaks right off. You see? I mean look at this fucking thing, what am I supposed to do with a dead cat without it's fucking TAIL?! HOW am I supposed to SWING this thing now, HUH?! Tell me that BOSS man!?!?!"

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[dsginter]

Unfortunately sometimes you can't just talk one-on-one to everyone and you will have to present information to a large group. Your options for presenting information to a crowd:
--vocal: just talking for an hour, which is popular in many religions, and we all remember what the sermon was about last Sunday, right?
--visual text: just endless paragraphs so they can read along which, as far as I can tell, no one does
--multimedia: pictures, audio and video that attempts to explain in a manner easily digestible, hence Powerpoint

The delicious irony of explaining the situation with what might as well be a powerpoint slide. Nice bullet points. A+++ would buy again.

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[WallaceAndGromit]

The legs.

There, I've increased your productivity by a factor of 5!

Got the quote wrong

[Frequency Domain]

If Powerpoint is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[blair1q]

o T
o L
o D
o R

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[FuckingNickName]

If you are lucky you will target 20% of the audience on average during the presentation.

Is the proportion of British soldiers in US military presentations usually that large?

*ducks*

(literally)

(-1, Flamebait)

(literally)

*ducks again*