Purblindness and PowerPoint
My good friend Dorothea has written an entry in Caveat Lector, her blog, that has touched me in a very special way. It reveals to me two things we have in common, we’re both blind as bats without our glasses and we both believe that there is a circle of hell reserved for the person or persons who came up with the idea of Microsoft PowerPoint.
Yes, I am a glasses wearing geek, as all my friends know, but I really don’t care. I am, in fact, quite proud of my geekhood, and wear the signs of it with chin held high in pride. I play Dungeons and Dragons. I work as a Network Administrator. I can tell you the distinct differences between an inline and block level element in CSS driven web-pages, or the differences between Div and Division in a program. I am a glasses-wearing, badge-adorned, card-carrying member of the Order of the Geek. And, damn I’m proud of it. I too have bad experiences with losing a lens to my glasses, although my frames allow me to just pop it back in, so that’s no real biggie. The day I lost my glasses though I was really lost. I almost cannot see without my glasses, my long vision is that poor. I have to hold things about a foot away from my face to read them. I was lost, couldn’t see, and basically couldn’t do anything, because I also had trouble finding my way around. Good thing I found them when I got home. There they were on the kitchen bench. Don’t know how I missed them, or how they got there in the first place for that matter. Oh well…crisis over.
PowerPoint though…ergh. My hate of PowerPoint dates back to high-school, where projects increasingly had a PowerPoint presentation as an assessment requirement, like it was somehow the greatest invention since fire and the wheel. I can think of some interesting things to be done with the makers of PowerPoint, involving both fire and wheels…but that’s something from the realms of pure fantasy. Imagine having to sit through class after class of badly-done presentations involving crappy transition animations and cheesy sounds, and knowing that yours was just as bad as everyone else’s because of the tools you were all relegated to using. It’s a nightmare, it truly is. It was, of course, made worse this year with the reign of terror that is Fuckrag, and his insistence of multimedia creativeness in a technical subject like Hardware. My hate of PowerPoint, since associatively it is now aligned with him, has increased exponentially, and I was most glad tonight I hear that Dorothea despises it as much as I do.
So I would like to say in conclusion: Glasses are good for those that need them, being a geek is nothing OTOH be ashamed of, and may Powerpoint die the grisly, horrible death it deserves.
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