presenting the BlackBerry 7130e

This morning I had do a presentation on a BlackBerry product for my job promotion. Being the slacker, I left the assignment and presentation till the night before. I was up till 1:30am working on it. It turned out to be a much harder task then I had originally envisioned. I discovered that I didn't know much about the topic.

I chose to present on the BlackBerry 7130e because it's one of the 3 corporate models. I basically went to the BlackBerry website and tried to absorb as much information as I could. I was going to be tested not only on presentation content, style and product knowledge but also on "tips & tricks". Since I don't know one and realistically have very minimal exposure to BlackBerrys in general I was nervous.

It was a sleepless night. Slept for about 4 hours but none of it was peaceful. Had dreams of being late for the presentation, it not working and my audience being bored out of their minds by the content (tech specs can get a bit dry). I always have sleepless nights when I have something to do the next day that I didn't prepare for. It's the dread of having people find out that I didn't put effort into this.

I got up, took a shower, put on a suit and packed my laptop. The paper assignment and presentation had to be copied from the laptop to a USB - I didn't have time to do it the night before. I thought I looked very professional - if nothing else I should earn some self presentation points! Look confident = feel confident. People at work asked if I had an interview - that's what we ask of anyone in our group that comes to work in a suit. The whole process of testing for this position has secretive. There are 4 people in my group all competing for the same thing so everyone is tight on what we say to each other.

The meeting started horribly. I was asked to send a Net Meeting invite to some people in Victoria (so that they could also see the laptop/projector screens from their meeting rooms). I haven't done that many net meetings so I fumbled through the software - wasting precious time. The laptop that they had set up only had one USB port. I had to sacrifice the mouse for my USB key. Then my USB key failed. I had to excuse everyone and rush the USB key back to my desk to load the presentation onto a network drive. All the while earning demerit points (we're also being marked on organization). When I finally pulled myself together, I felt like I flew through the slides. People asked questions during the presentation which threw me for a loop as I wasn't prepared to speak on topics such as architecture. Lol...what am I doing in the tech field? I should really be wearing a suit and asking people if they want a chocolate or white wedding cake! Not wearing a suit and pretending to be a RIM salsperson.

So now is the wait. There are 10 other candidates. Only 4 positions though so it's a going to be interesting what happens next. The last stage of testing is the interview. I'm not worried about that - use to panel interviews and am almost comfortable speaking to one.