David M. Bennett
POWERPOINT MAVEN
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Struggling with the PowerPoint QTB slides I was working o’er,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of something gently rapping, rapping through my hard drive door,
“‘Tis some hiccup now,” I muttered, “from behind my tower’s door,
“Only this and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak September,
And the flickering, lamplight’s ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow – vainly I had sought to borrow
From my slides surcease of sorrow – sorrow for the silly Corps –
Since the slides that I had been preparing for the silly Corps--
Soon its Generals would bore.
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of the dust cloth curtain
Made me think depressing thoughts that I had often felt before:
So to re-engage the beating of my heart, I stood repeating.
“This infernal, boring briefing that I’m making for the Corps –
Working late at night so that my boss can brief the silly Corps –
Is it lost forevermore?”
Presently my soul grew stronger as self pity whined no longer,
“Well, “said I, “o, gods of PowerPoint, your forgiveness I implore:
But the hard drive I was mapping has just crashed, my briefing crapping,
So that now my head I’m tapping, tapping on this plastic door,
And I scarcely thought I’d heard the noises coming from the core—”
So I opened up the door.
Deep into that dark hole peering, long I squinted, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming nightmares no staff weanie’d ever dreamed before:
But the whirring of the drive now broken gave me not a token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered, “Oh, you whore!”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the words “You whore!” –
Merely this and nothing more.
Back to-wards my flat screen turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something from my Outlook status;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore –
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore –
‘Tis an e-mail, nothing more!”
Open here the PowerPoint paper clip I clicked, and hoped that vapor
Would not be my hopes, as there appeared before me “help” galore;
Paperclip Man, vacuously winking forth, miraculously
Offering to help me with the fault behind my hard drive’s door –
Perched beyond a wall of plastic, just behind my hard drive’s door –
Blinking, smiling, nothing more.
Then this skinny clip beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the glib and slick decorum of the countenance it wore,
“Though thy bar be thin and graven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly skinny, Help Screen Maven, dancing o’er my lamp-lit floor –
Tell me what thy real screen name is on this night when others snore!”
Quoth the Clipman, “Who’s the whore?”
Much I marveled this ungainly icon, answ’ring me so plainly,
Though its answer no assistance – little hope of helping bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing Clip that really helped before –
Any twisted, goofy, smiling Clip that really helped before,
Spouting words like “Who’s the whore?”
But ol’ Clip Man dancing lonely on my placid screen, spoke only
Those three words, as if his soul into those words he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered, no aluminum he fluttered –
Till I scarcely more than muttered, “Other friends have ‘helped’ before –
On the morrow he will laugh at me when there is hope no more.”
Then the Clip said, “Who’s the whore?”
Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is it only stock and store
Caught from some programming master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one message bore –
Till the promises of hope to others he would just ignore,
Taunting all with ‘Who’s the whore?’”
But the Clip, now NOT beguiling any fancy into smiling,
Made me wheel a cushioned seat in front of Clip and screen and door,
Then upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous clip of yore –
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous clip of yore
Meant in croaking, “Who’s the whore?”
This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the clip, whose bubbled eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;
This and more I sat divining, with my aching neck inclining
Off the cushion’s padded lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er
But my cushion with the lining and the lamp-light from before,
Was now comforting no more!
Then I felt the air grow denser, as I let, without a censor,
Streams of foul obscenities bounce off my cold linoleum floor.
“Knucklehead,” I cried, “you spent the last twelve hours here but saved the
File to just the wretched hard drive that retrieves the file no more!
Why did you not back the file up on a disk just once before?!”
Quoth the Clip Man, “Who’s the whore?”
“PowerPoint!” said I, “thing of evil! – PowerPoint still, if clip or devil!
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee heretofore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, with this geek, alone, unwanted –
In this office clearly haunted – tell me truly, I implore –
Is there – is there hope I’ll find the briefing? – tell me, I implore!”
Quoth the Clip Man, “Who’s the whore?”
“PowerPoint!” said I, “thing of evil! – PowerPoint still, if clip or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us – by that God we both adore –
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
Files are backed up and not fadin’, so I still can brief the Corps –
Backed up and retrievable so I can brief the silly Corps.”
Quoth the Clip Man, “Who’s the whore?”
“Be that word our sign of parting, clip or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting –
“Get thee back into the tower and my hard drive’s churning core!
Leave no echo as a token of that curse thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! – quit this game and smile no more!
Take thy face from off my screen and disappear behind that door!”
Quoth the Clip Man, “Who’s the whore?”
And the Paper Clip, not flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid screen invalid, blinking just beside the door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the screen-light through him streaming throws his shadow on the floor,
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted – nevermore!
©Copyright 2010 by David M. Bennett
Author’s Note: PowerPoint, a software program used for presentations, might not sound like a subject very relatable to the military, but this recent NY Times article [reproduced below] might suggest otherwise:
By the way, that “Spaghetti Chart” is not a joke… it is briefed or referred to all the time over here at ISAF Headquarters, and hangs on many office walls.
I composed the above poem on the subject in 2001 while stationed at I Corps G-3 in Fort Lewis, WA.
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint
A PowerPoint diagram meant to portray the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan certainly succeeded in that aim.
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: April 26, 2010
WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, center, in Kabul in March. He gets PowerPoint printouts the night before staff meetings“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.
Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.
Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.
“I have to make a storyboard complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens,” Lieutenant Nuxoll told the Web site. “Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”
Despite such tales, “death by PowerPoint,” the phrase used to describe the numbing sensation that accompanies a 30-slide briefing, seems here to stay. The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.
“There’s a lot of PowerPoint backlash, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon,” said Capt. Crispin Burke, an Army operations officer at Fort Drum, N.Y., who under the name Starbuck wrote an essay about PowerPoint on the Web site Small Wars Journal that cited Lieutenant Nuxoll’s comment.
In a daytime telephone conversation, he estimated that he spent an hour each day making PowerPoint slides. In an initial e-mail message responding to the request for an interview, he wrote, “I would be free tonight, but unfortunately, I work kind of late (sadly enough, making PPT slides).”
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reviews printed-out PowerPoint slides at his morning staff meeting, although he insists on getting them the night before so he can read ahead and cut back the briefing time.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.
General McChrystal gets two PowerPoint briefings in Kabul per day, plus three more during the week. General Mattis, despite his dim view of the program, said a third of his briefings are by PowerPoint.
Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was given PowerPoint briefings during a trip to Afghanistan last summer at each of three stops — Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Bagram Air Base. At a fourth stop, Herat, the Italian forces there not only provided Mr. Holbrooke with a PowerPoint briefing, but accompanied it with swelling orchestral music.
President Obama was shown PowerPoint slides, mostly maps and charts, in the White House Situation Room during the Afghan strategy review last fall.
Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.
Captain Burke’s essay in the Small Wars Journal also cited a widely read attack on PowerPoint in Armed Forces Journal last summer by Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel, whose title, “Dumb-Dumb Bullets,” underscored criticism of fuzzy bullet points; “accelerate the introduction of new weapons,” for instance, does not actually say who should do so.
No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars, but the program did become notorious during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time.
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”
Helene Cooper contributed reporting.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 27, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.