Don't Be A Complete Tool

Every other month I meet with a group of my peer supervisors in our market.  The meetings are led by MisManager (lucky me!) and two of her counterparts.  The meetings are really just good for nothing else besides bringing us together as a group so we can use each other as additional resources.  There, so far, is not too much information to be gained there.

In our last meeting, MisManager's team dropped a bomb on us. "Oh, by the way, you all will be presenting the majority of the content for our next four meetings."  Oh really.  So instead of being subjected to your sage advice, we're going to be half-assing our way through a 45-minute long presentation.  Goody!  They did let us know we would be paired off, though, so I thought maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

Guess who goes first.  Yeah. Me.

Guess who got partnered up with the balding, cross-eyed, stuttering girl with facial hair.  Yeah, me.

So, because I'm a shallow asshole, my partner's personal appearance means I can't concentrate on what the poor girl is saying when we have in-person meetings.  I've done most of my communication with her by email.  It's just better this way, please trust me.

We were charged with the topic of "One-On-One Coaching".  At the time we were told that we could talk about whatever aspect of that we wanted, just so long as it was closely tied with the main topic.  Great!  We chose to focus on the difference between a coaching discussion and a disciplinary discussion.  Mostly, I wanted to do this because a lot of times my peers will intermingle the two and they really should be separate.

So we break all the work up in half.  I'm the more comfortable presenter, so I took the discussion piece.  I had to make up my own notes and materials.  It was no problem though.  One-on-one coaching is a part of my job that I enjoy and I have a lot to say about it.

My partner's job: tools and resources.  There are a lot of different forms that can be used.  We also have a lot of good advice and guidelines available to us on the company's intranet site.  Best of all, this woman is terrified of public speaking, so this gives her something very structured to put together.  She also doesn't have to get overly elaborate, just basically describe the materials she's pulled and call it good.

We met twice before the presentation.  The first meeting, she showed me her materials and the fact that she even wanted to organize them into a folder.  Beautiful!  She sounded confident in her presentation.  We discussed some weak points and worked them out.  She was good to go.

The second meeting, same thing.  There was no way she was going to fuck this up.  Except I'm writing about her on my "you're an asshole" blog, so we all know better.

Day of the presentation: she shows up with all of her notebooks and looks confident and then.... she starts telling me that she's not going to do the presentation we discussed.  She's just going to hand out her notebooks, but she has no plans anymore to discuss what's in them.  Are you fucking shitting me?  This is what we've planned for over a month now.  Our second meeting was the day before the presentation.  What the fuck changed your feeble little mind in one day lady?

I panicked.  She was going to sink the whole thing.  So what did I do?  I talked for 40 of our 45 minutes.  I let her mumble on for about the 5 minutes, but I kept directing her back to the materials in her folders.  I'm not sure anyone really noticed because they all liked the presentation, but I was on fire when I left there.

Guess who gets to do another presentation at the beginning of next year.  Yeah, me.

Guess who's going to beg for a new presentation partner.  Yeah, me.