Presentation of doom

Today was my first presentation at work. So, of course, I managed to go back to sleep after my first alarm this morning and still needed to iron my clothes. Running around the apartment, I managed to overcome these hurdles and still managed to have breakfast around 6:30, my usual time. I finish my cheerios, start eating the milk with a spoon while holding the bowl...and spill the milk all over my lap. Twice. Some mornings I rock. Shortly thereafter I stained my hands with shoe polish. Needless to say, instead of being early to work as desired, I didn't get in until nearly 7:15.

I still managed to make all the last minute adjustments to my presentation, prepare some test specimen, and go over the entire presentation a couple times. Around 11 my boss was at my desk going over the latest rev when he's paged by his boss's boss…who wants to see my presentation, but in a special presentation after the main presentation to the engineers and manufacturing people. Excellent. So I gave my presentation twice, which exhausted me. It took a full hour and a half to make it through my 30 slides with the first group. The second presentation, with the plant manager and head of the fluorescent division took an hour. That is a lot of time for an introvert like me to be "on". Even though the presentations went well, I just wanted to curl up and go to sleep afterwards. The right people jumped in with the correct supporting information at the right times; I had the backup documents cued for questions; the deck was impeccable, if forced due to template demands. Although it feels good to have done well, it feels better to be done.

Putting the presentation together did give me a lot of perspective over how much I have done over the last two months and how much I still have left to do. The company has a process for salaried (i think only salaried?) employees wherein at the beginning of every year, or in my case, assignment, the employee sits down with his or her superior and sets out concrete goals for the time span, e.g. increase line speed by 10%; decrease energy usage by 15%; design, spec, and install new baker. In my case, it got done a little late, but it included a largely weighted portion for designing and implementing an instrumentation system for the production lines. When putting together my final slide, future actions, my boss brought up that short term, medium term, and long term were not really sufficient for a time line. After some discussion, we agreed that the long term activities, namely the instrumentation system, were not realistic in the next six months. Oops. I wonder if I can go back and change my goals a little bit. If I can't, I think I'm about to fail at work. I don't think they'll fire me.

Today was generally pretty good. First major presentation down, 25% of Kentucky done, clear vision of what I still need to do, and visit from the Central Research contact who can make my work much, much easier. Excellent.