Gotta clean that presentation up

There's an effort on at my office to get the IT side of the 19th floor up to speed with what the trading side of the 19th floor does, and as part of that effort my boss Randy's peer Julie Boehl has been bringing speakers with business knowledge in to give "Lunch 'n' Learn" sessions two or three times a month: the head of the power trading desk gave a presentation about BG's power trading strategies, etc. Which I think is a great idea, and I'm absolutely thrilled to see that the IT guys actually want to learn this stuff.

Well, Paul Williams, BG Group's global CIO (for my kids: that stands for "Chief Information Officer" and it basically means the highest ranking computer guy in all of BG Group worldwide)...um, anyway, Mr. Williams is due to come into town next week, and my boss's boss John wants him to see some of the stuff we're doing. In particular, John has decided that Mr. Williams needs to attend a Lunch 'n' Learn...only, there isn't one scheduled for next week.

I should say, there wasn't one scheduled for next week. But there was one scheduled for tomorrow -- as it happens, I had agreed to teach twenty-five or so IT folks some basic information about hedging instruments...what a swap is, what kinds of swaps BG's gas traders use, what makes a financial option a "swaption," etc. So day before yesterday everybody who was planning to attend that presentation got a notice of a schedule change informing them that my presentation was being moved back a week so that Paul Williams could attend. Thus it happens that (a) there now is, in fact, a Lunch 'n' Learn scheduled during Mr. Williams's visit, (b) I'm giving it, and (c) I am getting teased from all directions about how nervous I should be careful to be. But I figure it's John who should be nervous -- he's the one who is dragging Mr. Williams into the presentation, not me.

Actually, on the way home Duane brought the subject up to yank my chain a little, and I told him, "Yeah, I know the CIO's gonna be here from the London office, and now I'm gonna have to go through that whole bloody presentation and make sure all the jokes are appropriate -- they almost certainly don't have enough profanity in them."

(If you ever haven't worked in an English office environment then that probably didn't seem funny to you; so in that case just take my word for it, it's a great line.)

So, um, I guess maybe I better get a haircut this weekend...more importantly, I need to be careful not to watch any episodes of "The Office" between now and then. The last thing I need is to inadvertently channel Michael Scott during the presentation.