PowerPoint

Bottom parked in yet another airplane seat, flying back from a particularly dispiriting presentation in DC last week, I murmured to myself, "Thank God for Maine." Now if only I could have injected/inserted/infused some of Maine's freshness and beauty that I feel so strongly about into that PowerPoint in that conference room on M Street. Maybe a slide of a rockwall just before our Internet Strategy, maybe a view of fog on the ocean just after the Budget Summary, maybe a picture of firs draped in snow sneaked in between Today's Agenda and the Goals for our Partnership, maybe put the little pig from my collection of driftwood on the conference table - maybe those would have cut through the gloom and alienation of the modern business presentation. The more I use PowerPoint, the more I think it's confrontational. Here is Us telling Them how to think, here are a bunch of words and numbers and maybe squiggly lines on a screen. Where's the conversation, the interaction, the invocation of that which make us human, seaweed and clams and seagulls on the shore, smelling of decay and vigorous rebirth?

Well, I'm back in Maine, and all is well with the world. M Street will do what it needs to do, with the resources it has to hand. Too bad.