A Sign of the Apocalypse (at the Office)

When I was in college, a fraternity brother who was one of those “Christians” prevailed upon me to read The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay. I sat in the living room of the fraternity house and read about the coming end times. I was still a good pagan, but the book was totally absorbing and read like a supermarket novel. (My girlfriend had just broken up with me and I was likely highly receptive to the idea of end-times.)

I enjoyed it, and was invited to a book discussion a few days later. The discussion turned out to be a meeting of all the born-again Christians in the fraternity. And me, the sole pagan. I manage to escape intact.

Lindsay was off by at least a few years. And he missed one of the most obvious and frightening end-signs. Had he only know what was coming, his timetable could have been exact.

It’s the devilish device that has strangled business, academia and government in a death-like vise for almost two decades.

It’s done more to destroy common understanding than anything else ever created by man.

It’s turned gifted speakers into automatons and audiences into rebellious serfs. Buried within its secret computer code is the number 666.

We’re all doomed.

The End Is Here

I’m speaking, of course, of PowerPoint. The end is not near; the end is here. 

Nothing can be communicated today without PowerPoint. Nothing. I can’t speak for government or academia, but nothing happens in business without PowerPoint. It’s a disease we’ve all caught, and we cheerfully spread it to others. “Forward-thinking” high schools teach it, and you can’t get a college degree without it.

It’s an industry. You can hire a PowerPoint consultant. You can take courses in PowerPoint. There are seminars devoted to it. There are whole libraries written about it, and the web sites devoted to it are legion.

PowerPoint is a cult.

Attend a speech at a conference. Every speaker must have his “deck.” Every slide typically has all white space covered in words, and the speaker will read every one of them. He (or she – this is an equal opportunity apocalypse) never understands that his audience can read faster than he can speak, finishing the slide long before he does.

People tweet and blog speeches now because they’re bored to death by PowerPoint.

And that’s despite all the PowerPoint “apps.” Business executives are nothing if not competitive. Who has the most complex graphics? How many videos can you embed on a single slide? Who can make the best use of Flash, or open up a web site right on the slide? How about live-streaming a Twitter convo?

You’re Kaputsky, Baby! 

I was one of several people presenting at a meeting recently. PowerPoint slides were mandatory. I gave my few slides to the organizer, who looked them over and smiled knowingly: You’re doomed, Young. No graphics or color. And only four or five words per slide! You’re kaputsky, baby!

Guess whom the audience paid attention to? They were rather astonished, yes, but then I was talking about something they deeply cared about. They listened. They asked questions. They forgot all the other presentations.

I gave another talk and didn’t use any slides at all. Despite the scandal, we all survived.

I’ve made a decision.

I will fight this evil, and I will fight it everywhere – the beaches, the streets, the auditoriums, the conference rooms. I will stand alone if I have to, but I will fight.

The world does not have to come to an end in an exploding deck of PowerPoint slides.

And I will write The Late Great PowerPoint.

(This article was originally published by The High Calling, and it reprinted here – slightly revised – under a creative commons license.)

Top photograph by Lode Van de Velde, and middle photograph by Ian L, via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Wandering in a desolation of dust

We wandered in the desolation

of the office, walls removed,

wires dangling without attached lights,

bathrooms emptied of all utility

we stumbled through clouds of white,

seeking the holy grail

the treasure at rainbow’s end:

the blueprint,

not what is

but what will be

what will be our place

This blueprint of promise,

of hope, of desire for something better,

even if something worse is suspected,

or feared, or anticipated,

this blueprint is the point of our wandering

in this desolation of dust,

dust wiped away

if only for a moment.

And we see it. It’s there,

hanging on a wall.

We cluster around the altar

of information, the intelligent design

of forcing the greatest number of people

into the smallest amount of space.

In silence, the blueprint speaks,

communicates its magic of certainty,

displaying its obvious wisdom.

And we know

this too shall pass.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Her Name is Char

The office building I work in is shaped like a slight altered “H” – two wings connected by a central corridor, three stories tall. It’s a campus-like setting, and three adjacent buildings are constructed exactly like it.

Every morning, a cleaning crew arrives at the buildings, a “crew” of one for each building. They work steadily throughout the day at three tasks.

They empty trash cans in every office and the common rooms, like small kitchens, copier areas and conference rooms.

They vacuum the floors.

And they clean the bathrooms – toilets, urinals, sinks, and floors. They empty the paper trash in the bathrooms, too.

The next day they return, and the cleaning starts over again. Every day is like every other day.

Turnover is high. Often the crews change weekly. It’s not a dangerous job, but it is repetitive, and boring, and it doesn’t exactly have the status of exalted work. The people are paid better than minimum wage, but not much better.

For about a year, we have had the same person cleaning our building. It’s highly unusual for a member of the cleaning crew to have that length of service.

Her name is Char.

She’s short and a little on the hefty side. She doesn’t so much walk as sway side-to-side going forward.

She has learned the name of every person in the building. That’s more than 300 people. In the same time period she’s been working our building, our department, which has previously occupied about 60 percent of one floor in one wing, grew dramatically. It pushed the other 40 percent into other buildings, moved one team to yet another building, and moved about 15 of us to an office suite area in the first floor of the building.

In numbers of people, the department grew from about 40 to 120.

Char learned the names of every new person who became part of the team. Every one. She knows every one of 120 people in our department by name. Not even the head of the department did that. And she knows the names of the other 180 people in the building, too.

And she talks.

She stops by my office for the trash, and always asks how I’m doing. (She calls me “Mr. Glynn.”) She’s asked about things on my desk (“Is that a chess piece, Mr. Glynn?” “Yes, it a replica of a Lewes chessman, found on a British island and made about 1200 A.D.” “I love to play chess.”) (“You’ve read all those books?” “Yes, I read a lot for the job.” “Oh, man, that’s a lot of books.”)

So one day curiosity gets the better of me, and I ask Char if she enjoys her job.

“Well,” she says, “I do most days. It’s not hard. There’s just a lot of it. But it’s like any job, I suppose, it has its highs and its lows. But I really like the people, I mean the people I work for. They treat us well. And I like the people here. Everyone is always nice.”

She pauses a moment, and then lowers her voice as she continues.

“My job is a gift, Mr. Glynn,” she says. “It is a gift from the Lord. It is a gift every day from the Lord.”

Her name is Char, and she just preached a sermon to me in 23 words.

I feel like I’ve been to church.

The High Calling has a community linkup this week, and the theme is “designed for work.” Take a look at the story there, and the links already added. If you have a story to share, please visit The High Calling and consider writing it, posting it, and adding your link. The linkup continues until Saturday night.

Photograph by Karen Arnold via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.