Yesterday I did one of those things that scare the kak out of me, while at the same time thrill me into an adrenaline high before dumping me into a state of dizziness and confusion. No, it wasn’t some kind of extreme sport! It was public speaking. I presented a talk at the Xtraordinary Women Networking Breakfast about the Importance of Image Rich Content in Strengthening Your Online Presence. Being a photographer, I know a thing or two about sharing imagery online.

Download My “A Picture Paints a Thousand Words” Presentation

In fairness, the talk itself wasn’t completely to blame for the post-presentation dizziness and confusion I suffered – there’s a bit of a backstory there.

The Backstory

So I was asked by Gwen, the founder of Xtraordinary Women, over a month ago if I would be the speaker for the next event, which I gladly accepted. That was a whole month ago! Naturally, I left it until the day before the talk to actually prepare the power point presentation. It’s good to see that some things haven’t changed since High School! I put it down to my youthful exuberance! All kidding aside, I knew what I wanted to say and the points I was going to make, I just had to get it from my head onto the slides.

Nevertheless, I finished the final touches to my talk around 21:00 on Monday, the event being first thing Tuesday morning. I was pretty chuffed. I’d finished with time to spare and could prepare for a good night’s sleep.

I should point out at this stage that last week I upgraded my business laptop. Yup! The company bought a shiny, new piece of hardware – always an exciting time in the life of a photographer!

But (and there’s another backstory here for a later post) a Windows laptop ALWAYS has updates to do, and on this particular oCafinnate Academysion, this update happened to send the laptop into a mind-numbingly-wheel-spinning frenzy. The damn thing wouldn’t shut down. The wheel just kept on turning. So I waited. And waited. And waited some more. Then I went to get ready for bed while the incessant wheel turned. Eventually, when I returned, the little wheel was still turning, but at least it had reached ‘99% complete’.

‘Yay!’ I thought, ‘I can go to bed’. Ready to ‘wow’ my audience tomorrow.

But no.

The wheel changed direction and suddenly the bliksem-se-thing was undoing everything because it couldn’t complete the final 1%.

SERIOUSLY?

Download My “A Picture Paints a Thousand Words” Presentation

So I stood and watched it, and watched it.

Eventually I sat down.

Then I went to get my book.

45 minutes later it still hadn’t made any more progress.

So I decided at that point to go to bed, and knew that when I woke in the morning, all would be well.

It wasn’t.

I happened to wake up at just before 1:00 and for whatever reason decided to check in on the patient.

Guess what?

I’ll be honest here and confess to having used a number of expletives which made for highly inappropriate witching hour language.

Needless to say, The Hubby woke up and came to my rescue.

To make a VERY long story, slightly less long, I’m super thankful that this hubby of mine geeks out in his spare time.

It took a while, but eventually his geeky magic worked. We finally went back to bed at 2:45.

6:00 alarms buzzed and I was at the event by 8:15.

So that’s the backstory.

Other than that, the talk went swimmingly, without a hitch, great audience participation, plenty of laughs and lots of value added.

THE END.

Oh and here’s some pics, courtesy of Cara from A Photographic Affair who was on camera duty for the morning. Thanks Cara.

Download My “A Picture Paints a Thousand Words” Presentation

 Second Backstory

I also shaved my legs – just for this talk. You know, ‘cos I’m professional like that!