PowerPoint Genius

Around the same time I enjoyed a confluence of improbably serendipitous events, I was working with one of my then employer’s summer interns. Although she was supposed to have been part of my team, at the last moment, my client slipped the start date of our project leaving me with nothing to assign to anyone. Instead of providing the intern with menial tasks, I had someone else ask her to fetch coffee I asked another team to find her something meaningful, yet stayed involved enough to make her learn Perl.

In spite of being an electrical engineer, the intern was pretty artistic. In fact, when she failed to answer a simple questions about the resistance a component would have were it bearing the same coloured stripes as the hair elastics decorating her wrist, I began to doubt her credentials. That she owned all the trappings required to make silk screens only cast further doubt upon her degree. At any rate, I was glad that she decided to put her silk screens to work creating some t-shirts, and stepped forward to buy one when she pitched the idea to my team. I’ve always had a fondness for squirrels, in spite of them terrorizing my father’s prized bird feeders. In what might have been one of that summer’s greatest travesties, the shirts did not feature any squirrels at all. Nonetheless, I handed over $15 for my new shirt, and prepared to leave for an August-long-weekend trip to my brother’s cottage. Just then, the intern sent me a text message:

Haha…I am going to miss you next week. You and your twisted delusional psyche. I’m going to donate your $15 to the anti-squirrel cause.

So, like all the best relationships, ours started with some teasing. Over time, though, the intern came around to liking squirrels, regretting terribly that she once suggested donating to an anti-squirrel fund. To this day, we share our mutual squirrel admiration by mailing squirrel-related things to one another.

Apart from making silk-screen shirts, the intern is also super crafty with PowerPoint, using the “curve” shape to make some fabulous drawings – including the squirrel in this post! Whereas most consultants can be fairly charged with abusing Excel, and we probably all use PowerPoint decks too often, she is clearly in a league of her own with her curve mastery. We should all observe a moment of silence to mourn the death of productivity – and celebrate yet another way to spend time during tedious meetings than watching Tivo’d episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia streamed from your home to your wifi enabled iPod via a Slingbox.