The DREADED school presentations. Most of the time, we are able to shake off feelings of nervousness or dread, and give a great presentation despite your body's efforts to derail you. Unfortunately, for the people in these stories, their presentations did nothing but crash and burn.
“A naked girl on the screen…”
“Back in college, about 3 years ago, one of my fellow students was giving a presentation to our class of about 25 people. To be honest, I don’t really remember what his speech was about, but he had a short video clip to support his argument at the end. With the Professor’s laptop and projector set up at the front of the room, the student inserts his USB Flash drive. He proceeds to click ‘Play’ and walks to go to dim the classroom lights for maximum visibility. He wanted to make sure there was no glare for students in the back of the room. The movie starts and slowly fades from black… Then it begins. There are sounds of moaning. A naked girl is on the screen pleasuring herself. The presenter now realizes he just clicked on the WRONG FILE and scurries to the computer to quickly shutdown the video simultaneously saying “Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God” about 17 times. I remembered looking around and everyone was in complete shock as to what was happening. The presenter finally gets the movie to close out and doesn’t say a word as he heads straight to his desk in embarrassment. The class uproars in laughter and the Professor, an elderly man in his 70’s, who hadn’t said a thing as this unfolded, now chuckles and says, ‘I need a copy of that after class!'” (source).
“Music of the 1920’s was gay…”
“It was freshman or sophomore year of high school, and we were working on our projects in the computer lab. It was a group project in which we were assigned a particular decade; our task was to describe the historical events, culture, literature, popular activities and trends of the time period. A group had left their Powerpoint open on one of the computer lab computers, but was in another part of the room for some reason. A mischievous fellow from a different group leaned over, making sure everybody could see him, highlighted some text on a slide, and changed it to ‘gay. It was trolling of little effort and maturity, easily undone by a CTRL-Z. I resumed work on our project and forgot about it for several weeks. The time came to give the presentations, and we stood before the grouped US History classes. Perhaps 60 students were crammed into a double-size classroom. We all marched up and took our turns presenting to the class. The 1890’s, 1900’s, and 1910’s went smoothly, albeit with plenty of stuttering, slide-reading and aversion to eye contact that accompany high school freshmen as they present. Then came the 1920’s. Their slideshow was great – loaded pictures of flappers and stock market charts. A quiet, studious Indian kid was presenting the culture section. He flicked to the first slide, Literature, and competently discussed Hemingway, Proust and ‘The Great Gatsby.’ Then he moved to the next slide, Music. The slide contained a single sentence, stark black-and-white Times New Roman: ‘The music of the 1920’s was gay.’ For just a second, he hesitated. His eyes widened. This was unexpected. Then, in an incredibly deft piece of live patter, he covered it! He launched into a spiel about how the mood of the 1920’s was festive and bright, leading to a gay and happy musical trend. He even explained that the reason the slide was blank was that it was supposed to have jazz music playing – but the school computer couldn’t handle the file! Everybody believed him. I will never forget the kid who didn’t catch an entire slide had been changed to the word ‘gay,’ but was brilliant enough to convince everybody he meant for it to be that way” (source).
The Onion
“This unfortunate kid in one of my human resource classes cited The Onion as his main source during a presentation…” (source)
Describing Porn in Detail
“Back in high school my World History teacher was the football coach. We were doing a presentation on a smart board when an instant message pops up from another teacher saying she caught one of the football players watching porn in her class. My teacher doesn’t reply so she then goes onto send multiple messages within a minute, where she starts describing the scene. My teacher finally gets to the computer and says ‘STOP SENDING THESE MESSAGES. I’M DOING A PRESENTATION AND MY ENTIRE CLASS CAN SEE THE CONVERSATION'”(source)
Brain Juice
“I was in a car accident on the way to giving a presentation in class. I felt good enough to decline an ambulance ride and I didn’t want to deal with rescheduling the presentation, but my head didn’t feel quite right. Fast forward an hour, I’m in the middle of my speech in front of the class when I start leaking brain juice out of my nose. It literally filled my cupped hands with clear fluid and I just stood there not knowing what to do before stammering ‘I had an accident.’ I’ll never forget the looks of horror” (source).
Following a Train Wreck
“In a high school senior level government class, we were tasked to find a political cartoon, research it, and present it to the class. This cheerleader found some incredibly offensive cartoon from www.nazi_monthly.com or some equally horrible site. Their cartoon depicted two armed guards standing under an ‘Auschwitz’ sign having some horrible conversation. I can’t remember exactly but it involved the cost of ovens and bullets or something… Anyway, she gave a 10 min presentation on how it was a political commentary on global warming because there were smokestacks in the background. It was unbelievable the teacher didn’t stop her mid presentation. I had the pleasure of following that train wreck…” (source)
Jesus and His Gentiles
“One time in history class during high school we were reading as a class. When my turn came up I pronounced ‘Jesus and his gentiles’ as ‘Jesus and his genitals’ (source).
One Hell of a Clincher
“I had a friend in High School that was finishing up an English paper during a study hall, the period before it was due. He finished it up and left to go to the bathroom, then came back and printed it out. Unbeknownst to him, this other guy had changed the final sentence of the paper while he was in the bathroom. The final sentence ended up being something like ‘And that’s why I like anal sex, or sticking my dick in tight assholes.’ The teacher commented on it saying he had ‘one hell of a clincher’ in his paper (source)
Single Celled Orgasms
“One day in my middle school biology class, a girl was doing a presentation about single-celled organisms. Only, she accidentally called them ‘single-celled orgasms.’ She screwed that up 3 or 4 times and it was increasingly funny each time. Our teacher was laughing too so there was no stopping it. The presenter was so embarrassed that after a few times, we’d know when she was approaching the word on her note cards because she would take a pause to try her hardest to not say ‘orgasm’ again” (source).
Contra!!!
“Guy in my class was about to give a presentation, but the professor noticed that he had an emulated Contra on the flash drive. Our professor then proceeded to stop him, get on the computer, and then play Contra in front of the whole class” (source).
Teacher’s Plan Backfires
“Started doing I.T in the final year of school and we’re getting a presentation about how to change the ‘hosts’ file on our computer. Our teacher was a particularly old-fashioned teacher who used to yell at us for no reason and generally keep the entire class in pin-drop silence. So he opens his computer, yells at a kid, telling him his life is a failure and he’s not going to get into university and to embarrass him makes him come to the front to demonstrate where to find the ‘hosts’ file. He goes up and clicks a folder on the teacher’s comp called ‘system files.’ Inside are pictures of a stag night he attended with the first picture being him in a naughty nurse’s outfit made out of 100% leather with a plastic vagina in one hand and chocolate sauce in the other” (source).
Arnold Schwarzenegger
“Guy in my class was giving a presentation and there was a video playing. It was some boring presentation about transistors, but half way through it there suddenly popped up a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger posing nude with his hips pushed outwards and his penis was censored by a machine gun. The guy had no idea what was going on. Also at the end of the presentation there was a Samurai who stabbed himself repeatedly in the stomach. That was one hell of a presentation” (source).
Confidence Doesn’t Always Bring Success…
“I took a class in philosophy where each student had to give a 15 minute presentation at the start of the 2 hour class on the reading prior. Having done all the readings up to that point and understanding their difficulty of presentation as being moderately low and having been overly confident in my speech ability, I put off doing the reading and preparation of the presentation until roughly 2 hours before the actual time to hit the podium in front of a class of about 100. The moment I opened my book to start the reading, I realized it was easily the toughest yet conceptually to explain as it was fairly nuanced, and I began to panic. Having scrabbled together what I thought would be a decent presentation, I slinked off to class and got in behind the podium. About 3 minutes in, I realized I didn’t know what the f–k I was talking about, and I could see the confused looks on my classmates. Cue sweaty palms and then full-on panic mode. My professor stood up and started talking to me, but her voice started to sound like the adults/teachers from Charlie Brown. The room began to spin and I blacked out. I woke up with about 7 people standing over me. Apparently, I was speaking complete indescribable gibberish for about 30 seconds. I understood what I was saying in my head, but no one else did, because I wasn’t speaking words. My professor had to stand up and come over to me before I stopped my continuous mouth dribble. When I blacked out, I face-planted into the front of the podium and whiplashed back down with crumpled knees. I still have no idea what caused it” (source).
Always Proof-Read…
“A girl was doing a presentation on Holodomor (a Ukrainian famine in the 1930s). She had a infographic that she had downloaded from somewhere, but she had not read the entire graphic. It turns out that she got the graphic from an antisemitic website, and the graphic was basically blaming the famine on Jews. It just had a couple of facts that she noticed and wanted in the presentation, and she didn’t bother to read the rest. The professor was Jewish, so he flipped out. She left the room in tears once he was done screaming at her. I didn’t see her again. I don’t think she passed the class” (source).
Aircraft Performance
“In my aircraft performance class, a kid was giving a presentation of some early jet and mentioning how the ejector seat would malfunction and activate when it wasn’t supposed to, but his words came out ‘the ejaculation seat had a problem of going off prematurely.'” (source)
“She thought I did it on purpose…”
“The night before I gave a presentation, my ex-girlfriend changed the background on my computer to a nude picture of herself in a sexy pose and shut down my computer. So, I go into the class, hook up the projector and start up my computer. Up pops the picture of her fully exposed on screen for the entire class to see. Oh, I forgot to mention. She was in the class and sitting in the front row. She thought I did it on purpose. We are no longer dating” (source).
Sexy Pictures.
“After the presentation I have to send the file and write up to my instructor. I go to send an email, and click attach, and up pops the file selector. It opens to the last location I attached from, which was a directory I had buried because it was full of sexy pictures. Of myself. Dang you thumbnail previews. At least I looked good in them” (source).
Fatal Mistake With Screen Sharing
“I was on a conference call for work with about a dozen people, where the host was also sharing her screen with everyone to go through a PowerPoint. She wrapped up her presentation but forgot to stop screen-sharing for the discussion and Q&A afterwards. I was asking her some tough questions, and she was being really evasive and difficult rather than just admitting that she didn’t know the answers to the questions. As I’m talking, I see her open up an instant message to one of her coworkers who was also on the call, and proceed to start talking sh-t about me. So, I sent her an instant message saying, ‘We can all still see your screen.’ Which, of course, everyone else on the call could see as well. She immediately stopped sharing her screen, and didn’t say anything for the rest of the call. It was gloriously uncomfortable” (source).
Jock 1, Jock 2
“During my first year of physics in public school we had to pair up and do presentations on a subject. The two biggest jocks of the class paired up. While their horrid presentation is on it’s way, jock #1 is talking, jock #2 decides that it’s a good idea to pull down the periodical system. This was one of those big canvases like a map of Europe or the world hanging over the blackboard, with a big wooden pole in the bottom. They are kinda nervous so he accidentally pulls down the periodical system really fast and with a lot of force. However, he did not see that jock #1 is standing directly beneath it and the pole hits him right on the top of his head. Jock #1 goes to his knees and is sitting behind the table for a while, cursing. Safe to say that the presentation did not go well” (source).