I begrudge everyone everything today but nothing as much as I begrudge you taking up three and a half hours of my day to learn a software program any average rodent could have learned in fifteen or thirty minutes.

The proper sales-related use of PowerPoint is to create an informative and enticing presentation for when you cannot be on-site at a client's location. This presentation should whet their appetites and encourage them to ask for or allow a "real" presentation, or at least call and ask for details and pricing.

When used in a live presentation, no PowerPoint screen should exceed 6 words. In a pinch you can go to 10, but when you hit 15 or more, you can be certain your audience is reading and not listening to you. It is not the proper use of PowerPoint to write a full-fledged proposal on all the minute features of your product in 14 pt text on twenty screens. (Especially not when you insist on using four font colors and three typefaces.) Nor is it actually a "sales presentation" for you to subsequently sit and read these screens to a captive audience.

The proper use of online conferencing/sales software is to show clients graphics and/or interactive demonstrations of your product. It is not to force ten people to sit at their desks and read your "PowerPoint presentation" of all the minute features of your product and listen to you read them all twenty screens of text.

But almost more than that, I begrudge the ten minutes of mine you wasted explaining to me how you were too busy to send out a fax today, so you needed me to do it for you.

I also begrudge the fact that you sent me the text for an e-mail in one document, the client's e-mail address in another document, and then e-mailed me to tell me to send the client the text of the e-mail. I wonder if it will ever in your life occur to you that you would have saved us both fifteen minutes and me a lot of stress if you'd just sent the client the damned e-mail yourself?

Today I have not completed your weekly bookkeeping update, I have not downloaded the client's database info for sending to the database administrator, I have not completed coding the job that's due out next Wednesday, I have not contacted those six other people about sending us database information, and I have not called any of those 40-50 potential new clients to find out for you precisely whose name you should use when calling and the best day and time to contact them.

And, if you ever ask my why I did not get to tasks such as these today, I will beat your pointy little head in with my rolling chair.

Sincerely,
Your (very nearly ex-) employee