White board butchers paper, Excel projections, ghosts on a white board or defective white wall, clicker pointing its way through, details start to fill the air, thousands of thought balloons float above everyone’s heads until they can’t see clearly any more – is there too much information? Just trying to impress, trying to influence the meeting to see the merits of this project, your project, your baby. You’ve staid up nights watching over it, hearing it teethe, the screams of agony as paragraphs and sentences grew like little toes and fingers. Gestating away in the womb of your brain until D-Day, today the Presentation.

You think there should be marching bands, streamers and tinsel dropping from the ceiling it’s so good ,so solid so airtight – it cannot be refuted or ignored, your argument, so persuasive, laid down thick like butter on those toasty old soldiers from the upper echelons. There’s no time for fear , just action, plowing on , through your well worn presentation, so well rehearsed you’ve left a curve in the mirror where your mouth sits, you’ve shot machine gun strafes of verbs and adjectives at the mirror. Making sure your head is up, you ‘are’ making eye contact, it seems as satisfying as cocking a 45 Colt pulling back the hammer and shooting that point right into the brain of the Vice President and without thinking reload, and click into the eye of the President of sales and marketing. BANG!, gotcha- you think your GOD, think you’re cool , hip, ‘there’ and by the end of the scenario a bible of butchers paper has been flipped and you HAVE been God for your fifteen minute window.

A polite ‘thank you’ emits from the stone faced President and you walk out not knowing what to think. Did they like it? Do they like me? Ball bearings of insecurity roll around your tummy. Your re-run all the lines that didn’t get said quite right and you realise what you were doing in there- Performing. All a sham, convincing these people to drink your cup of poison, your Jonestown massacre. Why should they invest the mutli -millions of $$$$$$ in your bird brained scheme? Why do it, why embarrass yourself this way. Elation to dejection in the time it takes to reach the elevator. Your stomach is left hanging on the thirtieth but your mind is already elsewhere, trying to think of some easy rock to crawl under, but it’s a desert in the office. There’s just those big bulbous bowls of water full of Goldfish whose tails swing non-chalantly, swishing in slow motion……