Friday 5 December 2008

Little things please little minds

Those of you who, like me, have to attend meetings may have heard of the expression "death by Powerpoint" and one attendee on a 10-day BT training course related to me how he was told that the most important thing in his package of course materials was the elastic band that held the course notes together...... because you could put it around your wrist and flick it to help stay awake.

Last night I sat through a couple of hours of Powerpoint presentation with a speaker who managed to make a potentially dull subject quite interesting and I learned a lot of useful facts and information. His forte obviously wasn't public speaking which made his achievement even more laudable but he he did tend to have the habit of saying "sort of" and "ermm". Quite a lot. Being slightly anarchic in nature I couldn't resist turning this into a game so I began keeping a count of the number of times during each slide that he said "soft of, ermm"..... not just "sort of" and not just "ermm" but it had to be "sort of, ermm". One slide provoked a few questions and probably as a result of that he peaked at a massive fourty-five "sort of, ermm"s for that slide while I desperately avoided the gaze of the person next to me (who was in on the game) for fear that would both erupt into laughter.

So what little things do you do to liven things up a bit?

3 comments:

Worcester Park said...

I find Bullsh*t Bingo passes time best during dull business meetings, although if your colleagues are into finding synergy and blue sky thinking then the boxes can get filled a little too quickly.

Anonymous said...

Whilst thinking outside the box, i came to the conclusion that we're not comparing apples with apples rather apples with pears.... oh the fun i could have with buzz word bingo.

Anonymous said...

Counting the bricks of the building opposite works for me. I'm doing it now!