Two of my cohorts and I watched a webinar today. We projected it so we could all see.

It was a geek trying to introduce some new software for people who belong to his organization to use to update their information. My opinion: Geeks do better under the covers/hood, sales people do better giving the presentations. Now and again there are people who can do both, but they are few and far between.

Kyle is not one who can do both. I’m not knocking him, I’ve known him for years and he’s Smart. But … he’s a geek.

He was using GoToWebinar, which is a lovely inexpensive piece of software for doing online webinars. Generally, it’s set up so only the organizer and the panelists can speak in the conference call. The rest of the audience is always muted. This works better than you might think.

There’s a chat box that each participant can see on their screen, and Kyle can see them all. During the presentation we could type questions via the chat screen, and when he was done he would answer them.  I was elected the typist for our little group.

We alternately made fun of and felt sorry for Kyle during the presentation and then more so during the Q and A. A lot of the questions were from non-geeks and were programmatical in nature – not his thing and he kept apologizing for not knowing the answers. I threw in a few geeky questions he could answer and some he couldn’t.

We were still mostly engaged, and he kept trying to wrap it up after a half hour with, “Are there any more questions? Oh, looks like there’s one more,” and he’d try and answer it. After maybe 6 or 7 times doing this routine, he asked one more time in a plaintive voice, “Are there any more questions?”

The woman sitting beside me leaned over and made typing motions to me. She growled, “Yeah, what are you wearing?”

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Hah hah. Long ways to go for that one line. Maybe you had to be there. 🙂