I try and not have a lot of things in my life that I can legitimately say that I hate, as unbelievable as that may sound. But seriously, I think that it takes a modicum of emotional attachment to hate something, and there are times in which I don’t want to give any particular person, place or thing the satisfaction of having some sort of attachment at all to me, even if it is one that of hatred.
But god damn, do I ever fucking hate PowerPoint.
Seriously, nothing ruins my day faster than having to do something in PowerPoint. Projects in PowerPoint not only make me want to quit my job, they make me feel like the world is this gigantic flawed place where nothing can possibly go right. They make me question existence outright, and make me feel apocalyptic feelings of ending the world and that everything on the planet is putrid shit.
The image above is an actual project that I had to do at work. It’s not a PPT slide presentation at all, which is the sole reason why PowerPoint exists in the first place. But because it has the rudimentary capability of doing some layout, it’s the de facto layout standard to the masses of luddites who think it’s the greatest most versatile software on the face of the planet.
To add insult to injury, the rationale behind everyone wanting their shit in PowerPoint is typically the same across the board – it’s so that they can request a copy of it when it’s done, and they can modify and edit it as they see fit.
How would you feel if someone asked you to build them a gun, so they could shoot you with it?
The irony is that they’ll get their PowerPoint, because some asshole coined the phrase that the customer is always right, and then they’ll inevitably screw it up, and then it’ll be the job of mine, or some other unfortunate graphic designer, to fix it. So, it’s more like a gunshot to the kneecap, where we’re not dead, but honestly, we might wish we were.
The reality the project is however, it’s some sort of series of charts and boxes that is really, really difficult to edit, because PowerPoint is a piece of shit program where everything takes forever, and the littlest tasks such as zooming in, adjusting tabs and drawing arrows are roughly the equivalent of trying to shovel snow with chopsticks.
This particular project ruined my day, to say the least. It made me feel like every other project on deck couldn’t be gotten to today. It made me feel like I had a 275 pound sack of shit on my shoulders that I had to crawl on my knees and fingertips to get out of. It made me feel like the entire day was going to be wasted on this fucking project.
And worst of all, it made me have to skip going to the gym, because it was deemed excessively importantly crucial to have done THIS DAY. If I were in charge of the world, the latter offense would be punishable by death. I fucking hate skipping the gym.
Getting a PowerPoint project like this makes me fantasize about going back in time and eviscerating the person(s) who invented PowerPoint in the first place. Seriously, it’s like, if I could go back and alter one event in time, without any repercussion to the space-time-continuum or some other SyFy (yes, spelled deliberately) horror scenario, I wouldn’t go back and prevent AIDS or Ebola, or stop any of the major wars, assassinations or any events that truly really mattered in the history of the world. No, I’d still go find the person(s) responsible for the creation of PowerPoint, and wipe them out of history before it could actually happen. And then I’d return to the present time, where hopefully, people might actually, see the merits and efficiencies of making stupid giant posters of boxes with words in them, in something like InDesign.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I would actually prefer to build a chart like this in Quark, over PowerPoint. Seriously, I fucking hate Quark, but compared to working in the Ford Festiva of PowerPoint, Quark looks a Corvette. The existence of PowerPoint, has LITRALLY made me find one good thing to say about Quark.
Fuck both of them, but definitely PowerPoint more.
