Hey, wanna hear about a fun part of my job that I didn’t really think about when I signed on?

So, I make these pretty little presentations, and the accompanying script that the presenter would read. I honestly enjoy that part. Playing with PowerPoint can be a lot of fun when you start fooling around with custom animations and stuff like that.

But then – THEN! – after that’s all done, I get to make an audio recording of myself reading the presentation so that any potential presenters can listen to it and get an idea for context and flow. Now, why anyone would need this, I have no idea. You’d think that they could just read the script and understand how to speak it. My guess is that it’s for the non-native English speakers, who might need some assistance. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, there just happen to be a lot of non-native English speakers in my chosen industry.)

And oh my lord, I haaate doing this. As soon as I start talking into my little microphone, my mouth dries up and I feel like I’m talking with a mouthful of cotton. And I loathe the sound of my own voice when it’s recorded. Heck, I didn’t even record the outgoing message on our home voicemail. I made Dave do it.

Also? I talk really fast. So the presentation is supposed to be an hour long, and when I did my initial read-through of it, it was barely 30 minutes. So I have to go back and do it again and focus on talking more s-l-o-w-l-y.

Oy. Hate.