In defense of we youngsters, I never encountered an O-3 staff officer (BDE or below) who seemed to care all that much about what the slide looked like. It was a shell with blanks that needed to be filled in with numbers, colors, shapes, and brevity codes. On the other hand, my Company Commander freaked out when I was a Platoon Leader and put together a slideshow (as ordered) to brief the BC on the conduct of a range. My faux pas? I did not include the brigade crest in the upper left of the master slide or the battalion crest in the upper right.Originally Posted by Hacksaw
Thankfully, I was not relieved. Later, when I was a junior CPT acting as S-3, a hypermotivated MAJ at BDE kicked back my QTB and Gunnery slides no less than a dozen times for purely cosmetic reasons (often demanding that I redo my previous undo). (I eventually got him back. My last act as S-3 was to RECLAMA the OPORD for deployment back to Iraq).
Bandwidth. You got it. That was my peeve. In 2005, in a dusty patrol base in Iraq, I received an email that stated simply, "Download attached slides and comply immediately. Report when complete." This was from BDE, forwarded immediately by Bn. I thought, wow, sounds important. The slideshow was a zipped file, about 8 megabytes in size. When unzipped, it was outlandishly enormous. I had to kick everybody off of the internet so that my laptop could monopolize the bandwidth and download the file in under 40 minutes. Once I finally downloaded it and my worn out laptop strained to open the file, I found an 84-slide presentation (that's EIGHTY-FOUR) on how to inspect an AT-4 for serviceability. No ####. What Private doesn't learn this in basic training?
It was a digital photography extravaganza showing, step-by-step, how to check to ensure the sights are present and not broken and other apparently complicated things. The best part was that the date/time of the photos were in the lower right corner of each photo. The photos were taken over a 5 HOUR period. WTF? Some sorry staff weiner spent 5 hours snapping pictures to illustrate one of the simplest tasks in the skill level 1 manual. I am guessing that he spent another two hours putting the slides together, judging from the time that the file was saved.
Now, I've worked with some hypermotivated, overcaffeinated individuals in my day, but none had succumbed to this degree of masochism. Putting together this slideshow monstrosity could only have been the idea of somebody above O-3. I don't know how high up the rank structure one must go in order to think that this made any sense, but no CPT hates himself that much. It had to be at least a MAJ.
). Given that most segments of the population can be divided into aural and visual learners you really need to hit the right balance. Even I cannot function if hit by too many slides in a ppt presentation. Its like most things, you need a balance.
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