Careful what you share

I recently stayed late at the office one evening, tweaking a "Chalk Talk" presentation that I was going to deliver to our division the next morning.

As usual Stephanie was working late as well. Stephanie is a PM with too many bosses who all invariably want their reports yesterday. Therefore what mortal men consider extended hours are to Stephanie just business as usual.

Anyway, we paused for a brief dinner and got into a conversation about our children. Stephanie mentioned a great series of books for young people called "Outrageous Women". I browsed to it on Amazon.com and sure enough it looked like an excellent series about the accomplishments of some of history's greatest women such as Louisa May Alcott, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, and Harriet Tubman.

Anyway, dinner ended and I finished my presentation and headed for home.

Next day I came in bright and early, and fired up the presentation for 150 or so live and internet attendees.

Of course the presentation gremlins were the first ones present as usual, and I had a great deal of difficulty setting up the sharing on our MeetingPlace meeting (MeetingPlace is our enterprise WebEx type presentation application).

After a good 15 minutes I got the sharing working, and started looking for Power Point and the other applications I needed to share.

To my horror, one of the applications listed in the sharing selection pane was "Outrageous Women". The implication suddenly occurred to me, but I didn't say anything, just hoping that no one would notice.

Next day I was told that my entire division was talking about my Outrageous Women snafu.

So stuff this in your fortune cookie - Confucius say - alway check your process manager before doing presentations!