I’ve been over here, for what, a month?  A month and six days.  The day that I arrived I inquired into the status of my bike, and right from the get-go it’s been a conspiracy to keep me off a motorcycle.  Ok, so there’s no way to get a license to ride my Beemer until March?  So I can’t even get it out of the creepy shipping lot to make sure it’s not inside a crate laying on its side?  Holy moly.  Part of me is still in denial, by the way… the other part, reluctant acceptance.  Fine.  I’ll bite.  I’ll suck it up and get a 125cc.  I’m a man.  I’ll deal.  I thought the US was bad with all its rules and regulations… but over there, some semblance of logic is injected into the situation.  If I ride the bus between now and March, I’ll suddenly have the prerequisite experience to ride a full sized bike.  Criminy!

To get the Rieju SMX 125 Supermoto that I’m buying, I’ll have had to have gone to the dealership a total of four times.  What the heck!  I needed a bike two weeks ago!  Seriously.  It’s just getting silly at this point.  I keep waiting for Ashton Kutcher to pop out of my closet, but then I remember that I’m not a celebutante. 

I got conned into a day’s worth of training.  I got an email from one of the more senior guys in my organization that I have to show up at 0900 for a short training session.  Swell.  No big deal.  It’s my first real day of work by myself, but it’s ok.  I won’t have any problems.  Sure, I have a ton of stuff to do, but I’ll be done before lunch.  Wrong!  I sat down at the conference table, and a nice gentleman puched a two inch binder in front of me… bursting at the seams… “with what?”  you may ask.  With PowerPoint slides.  I’m not sure if I’ve blogged about PowerPoint before… but nonetheless, let me give a short description of my feelings on that special little program.  If you want to cap the amount of communication that happens in an organization (particularly a large and/or dynamically operating one), then introduce PPT as the standard briefing and meeting presentation tool.  Put PPT in front of me, and I become a zombie.  I may as well not be there.  If they are really long briefs, then forget about it: I become an irate zombie.  There’s something about that bulletized format, that sterile break-everything-down-so-each-section-fits-on-a-slide mentality, that useless logo that your company has to put on there, that makes the meat of whatever you’re presenting to into mush…  Greyish-whitish mush that doesn’t constitute anything but an obstacle between now and the end of the meeting.  Not to mention that using PowerPoint means that you no longer need to remember what you’re talking or briefing about.  There’s nothing better than listening to a fool mutter and whisper about his brief to an audience of hundreds while you try to signal the guy by the door to get you another Monster.  I’m going to stop with all the PowerPoint hating now, but I’ll stop with this: if you want to really learn how to convey your point visually, then you need to find a guy named Edward Tufte.