Conflict and Irritation--without Powerpoint!

RantWoman is very glad to advise her readers that, yes indeed, despite the near ubiquity of Powerpoint, it is entirely possible for presentations to annoy and aggravate RantWoman without going anywhere near Powerpoint. RantWoman herewith offers a number of helpful hints, some of which work just great WITH Powerpoint as well:

--Write in illegible chalk on a chalkboard. Oops, RantWoman forgets she is no longer expected to read the blackboard in the first place.



--Point all over the visual aids, either digital projection (did anyone say Powerpoint?) or analog blackboard / flip chart. Frequently use phrases like "over here" and "this one there." Never, ever mention whatever words or concepts might be associated with "over here" and "this one there."


--For bonus points, bounce past "over here" and "this one there" when recapitulating the group input just written in the illegible medium of your choice. RantWoman's memory is so acute, her mind-reading so fine-tuned that she can reconstruct the summmary bullet points proposed out of thin air with no guidance whatsoever!



--Lose the request to have handouts emailed in advance.

--Email half the handouts and promise to email the rest before the sessions where they are to be used. Then lose track of that promise.

--Have a discussion about how people can seat themselves so that people bothered by interpreting into another language are not bothered, but then forget to ask questions of the people specifically using interpreters so that maybe they could get a word in edgewise.

--Make sure the workshop is in a large echo chamber with a lot of gratuitous banging and clattering from the people starting cleanup.

--Give people two hours of non-stop work without a break at the end of the evening so that their bladders are bursting and their brains already headed out on holiday. Then start the banging for cleanup before the workshop ends, when everyone is trying to tighten up a whole bunch of loose ends.

--Plan a workshop for a population with a whole WIDE range of sensory, physical, and other challenges. Gear the workshop for people with college degrees. Supply all kinds of cheery statistics about how 75% of communications is about body language. Fail to adjust any content or presentation in light of the population. If 75% of communication is about body language, but the audience includes a lot of people with different spinal and other anatomical problems as well as a large chunk of the audience who are blind, what is to be done to overcome miscommunications? May we just scream "Use your words?"

RantWoman further recommends workshops about conflict resolution as especially rich in Powerpoint-free opportunities for RantWoman to become annoyed. It's not just that whacking one's way through hassles of inaccessibility and bad attitude means conflict pretty much comes pre-assigned. Nor is it enough to be blessed (?) with not one but TWO nearly synchronous series of opportunities to attend independent exercises about Conflict Resolution. Life is so much better if the very exercises about conflict resolution generate a rich and varied selection of opportunities to feel conflicted, conflictual and conflictive.

To cite just one example, presenters spoke of the "umbrella statement," a technique for training to open a conversation. RantWoman went all literalist on the metaphor. RantWoman has a bit too much experience where trying to share umbrellas is a good way for someone inadvertantly to get poked in the eye or dripped on.

On top of this, RantWoman specifically needed to invite people from the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing. This valuable part of our community is also a veritable swamp of conflicts of numerous sorts: interpersonal, lack of the kinds of rough edge buffing experience a workplace sometimes inflicts, on top of disability-related issues. In other words, the place really needs the workshop, but the workshop is especially adventure-filled precisely because everyone from the Friendly Neighborhood Center... is busy manifesting all the conflict-inducing behaviors, habits of mind, and predilections that cause the conflict resolution workshop to be needed in the first place.

RantWoman is further overachieving on the conflict front, having both a rich banquet of daily conflicts and a simmering mutating months-long conflict with a friend who happens to, drum roll please, teach conflict resolution! RantWoman humbly acknowledges that this last point is so stressing out her immortal soul that she thinks she is going to expound further in the context of her other blog and keep everyone here guessing.