I had to do a presentation at work today. I had time to prepare for it, but I felt a decent amount of resentment that I’d been forced into needing to present at all. The testers at my employer meet once a month (virtually) to watch (or at least listen to) a presentation by representatives from one of the testing teams. The goal is for each team to take turns presenting some aspect of their work in order to foster inter-team communication and provide each other with information that could prove useful in our testing work. While this makes sense for some of the teams, it is pointless for others. It is especially pointless for my team. While a few teams in the Research and Development department work together or work on related products, our company’s diversification means that a lot of us work on entirely unrelated things. Literally no part of my testing work will ever be useful to anyone who isn’t on my team and we already share everything internally, so there’s no point to me going to the meeting. The whole meeting only exists because of a bit of political maneuvering as two people higher up the corporate food chain fought over control of the testers for reasons I can’t fathom. It’s not like either one of them has any actual authority over the rest of us. Neither of them was, is, or ever will be in my management structure. But I still have to go to these meetings and take multiple hours out of my day to prepare a presentation for them, for some reason.

Normally, I protest the meetings by never attending. Unfortunately, due to some ball-dropping by my coworkers who usually go to represent our team, we went from presenting in June to presenting in July. At a time when both of them, coincidentally, were going to be on vacation. Which they finally shared less than a calendar week before I was supposed to be ready to present. I had less than two full work days, even, since our presentation was schedule for the day after an official four-day holiday weekend. I still pulled it off, though, because I’m working on something in my (incredibly scarce) spare work time that could actually be applicable across the company. So I slapped some visuals and templates together, figured out what I wanted to say, wrote it out this morning, and presented earlier this afternoon (of the day I wrote this, not the day with went up). It went well, thankfully (despite my social anxiety and bad experiences with public speaking), since I didn’t want to make an ass of myself in front of the scant few testers who weren’t away on vacation on the fifth of July. It was going to be the first time most of them officially met me, after all. I wanted to make a good impression since I could no longer avoid making one at all.

I was charming, appropriately funny, able to answer all the questions to my own satisfacation, and even managed to keep a smile on my face when the person running the meeting jumped in to do some politicking. I filled the time allotted to me, though that was mostly thanks to the help of a pair of particularly vocal testers who were doing something similar on their own team (though they have very different goals). Almost no one else spoke. I got the strong impression, as the meeting came to a close following the words of our self-proclaimed leader, that most people felt the same way I did and were only there because they were required to be. It’s not like we don’t all have too much work going on to get done in a regular, forty-hour workweek. I mean, I resent this meeting and this is literally the first time I’ve gone to one of these in over three years. I spent about three hours total preparing for this shindig and that’s time I’ll never get back. Sure, my idea might have be broadly applicable, but only if there’s a team dynamic like the one that exists on my team and I doubt most teams have problems like this that still need solving at this point. Or that the other testers will take it upon themselves to solve the problems because, again, we’re all so damn busy. We’re short-staffed and still spending time every month at this useless meeting.

I’d prefer to get everyone together in the same room than do something this useless virtually. That way I’d get to meet people rather than blankly talking at my webcam and getting nothing back since no one who isn’t presenting or talking turns their cameras on. If I’m going to be forced out of my anonymity, at least let me do it in a way that properly introduces me to people rather than forces me to perform to a webcam. Thankfully, I remembered to tidy up my office a bit beforehand and checked to make sure my headset was working properly (good thing, too, since it wound up taking me five minutes to get my mic working when I turned it on fifteen minutes before the meeting). I just have no patience for people wasting my time and there was absolutely nothing redeeming about the three hours I spent on this meeting. Even the people making suggestions on ways I could improve my templates had nothing useful to add. I’d already considered all their ideas and either discarded them due to the particulars of the situation on my team or was saving them for round two in order to avoid overwhelming people with things they needed to do while learning to use a new tool.

I have no idea if this was even a fairly standard meeting or not. It’s not like I’ve got experience with any recent iterations of the meeting that would give me a sense of how today went. I just hope no one thinks I’m an idiot and that no one recently presented something similar. Otherwise, I probably did fine. I’m pretty good at getting my thoughts together and writing in a conversational tone so that I don’t have to do much adjustment in my head as I’m reading through my notes during a presentation. Plus, I was talking about something with which I have a decent amount of expertise, so I was pretty comfortable improvising. Still, a little feedback would have been nice. Even if it wasn’t explicit “you did a great job” or “you were terrible” type comments, it would have been nice to see people’s eyes and expressions. At least then I’d know that no one was paying attention or that I’d somehow deeply insulted someone. Neither of which is likely, but I won’t know if I did either one until I start getting dirty looks in the hallways. Which, you know, is great for my anxiety.