If Dante were alive today, he wouldn’t need to invent elaborate punishments involving ice, fire, and rivers of souls—he’d simply describe the corporate meeting room, a place where time slows to a crawl and PowerPoint slides stretch endlessly into eternity. Here, in the ninth circle of workplace suffering, the air is thick with dread and passive aggression, the projector hums ominously, and all hope is abandoned at the door.
PowerPoint was supposed to make life easier. It was designed as a tool for clarity, a way to convey ideas efficiently, to engage an audience. But much like Prometheus’s fire, it has been stolen by the wrong hands and twisted into something monstrous. Instead of enlightenment, it brings only despair—the flickering glow of an overworked laptop illuminating yet another slide deck destined to ruin your afternoon.
If you’ve ever sat through one of these marathons of misery, you already know. If you’ve ever had to create one, you are complicit. And if you’ve ever genuinely enjoyed one, you might be in league with the Devil himself.
The Endless Descent: PowerPoint’s Seven Deadly Sins
The first sign that you have entered PowerPoint Hell is the arrival of an email, innocuously titled “Quick Presentation for the Team.” The attachment, however, tells a different story. The file size alone suggests it contains at least a small novel. The preview reveals slide after slide, stretching toward a future in which you will have aged significantly before it’s over.
The meeting begins with the standard lie: “I’ll keep this quick.” But the screen flickers to life, and you see the number of slides. It is not quick. It is never quick.
This is just the beginning. You have yet to endure the true horrors that lie within, the seven unforgivable sins of PowerPoint presentations.
First, there is The Never-Ending Deck, the presentation that should have been six slides long but instead spans the length of a minor academic thesis. Each new slide is a fresh betrayal, a reminder that there is no escape, only the slow, inevitable march toward a conclusion that may never come.
Then comes The Bullet Point Abyss, where paragraphs are mercilessly crammed into list format, each new sentence drier than the last. These slides exist not to inform but to wear down the soul, ensuring that by the time the presenter reaches the last point, you no longer have the will to live, let alone engage with the content.
The Font Crime Scene follows, a collection of typographical atrocities that defy all principles of design. The slides assault the eyes with Comic Sans for serious topics, text that is either microscopic or blindingly large, and a random selection of colours that physically hurt to look at. Some fonts whisper “We are a respectable corporation,” while others scream into the void of professionalism.
The Stock Photo Hall of Shame makes its inevitable appearance. No PowerPoint presentation is complete without images that add nothing: blurry office workers shaking hands, a stick figure aggressively pointing at a graph, a pensive man staring into the distance, as if contemplating whether he, too, will survive this meeting. The pinnacle of meaninglessness is reached when a mountain is included to represent success, a metaphor so vague and overused that even the mountain itself seems embarrassed to be there.
But it is The Animation Apocalypse that truly brings suffering. Words do not simply appear; they must fly in dramatically, or spin in at alarming speeds, or fade in letter by letter, drawing out the pain one excruciating second at a time. The presenter clicks too soon, and suddenly a sentence meant to be revealed slowly has arrived all at once in a chaotic tumble, throwing the speaker into panic.
The Pointless Pie Charts make their grand entrance, confident in their complete lack of clarity. A bar graph with no axis labels, a pie chart with 19 categories, a 3D chart so distorted that all meaning is lost. The presenter nods wisely at the mess of meaningless data, saying, “As you can see here…” But no, we cannot see here. We cannot see anything.
And finally, there is The Presenter Who Has No Idea How to Use PowerPoint. They are at war with their own slides, clicking too far ahead, accidentally skipping back, closing the whole presentation, and somehow opening their desktop calendar by mistake. They utter the familiar phrase, “Sorry, let me just go back for a second,” and in doing so, reset the entire timeline, forcing the audience to relive previous slides as if trapped in a nightmarish PowerPoint purgatory.
The Five Stages of PowerPoint Grief
At some point, every victim of a PowerPoint presentation moves through the same psychological journey.
First comes Denial, the hopeful belief that perhaps this will be a short one. Maybe the speaker will stick to key points, maybe they’ll move quickly. Maybe—and this is the most dangerous hope of all—they will skip some slides entirely.
This delusion is quickly shattered, and Anger sets in. Why must we endure this? Why is there so much unnecessary detail? Who on earth approved this deck?
Next, Bargaining takes hold. If you fake a coughing fit, will they let you leave? If you pretend to take notes, can you get away with scrolling your phone? Is there any way out of this fate?
But the weight of it all soon crushes you, and you enter Depression. The lights seem dimmer. The room gets colder. You let go of your ambitions, your dreams. You will die here, in this meeting room, on Slide 43 of 78.
At long last, Acceptance arrives. You lean back in your chair. You stare, dead-eyed, at the screen. You have given up. This is your life now.
How to Survive PowerPoint Hell
Those who have endured this torment enough times develop survival techniques.
Some take fake notes, carefully writing down absolute nonsense just to appear engaged. Others employ strategic nodding, maintaining the illusion of participation while mentally retreating to a happier place.
The strongest among us play PowerPoint Bingo, internally ticking off every predictable slide trope: a stock photo handshake, a meaningless quote in italics, a pie chart no one understands.
And when all else fails, there is only one true escape: retreating into the mind, imagining a world where PowerPoint does not exist—a world of freedom, of joy, of meetings that are conducted without 67-slide presentations about workflow efficiency.
Conclusion: There Is No Escape
The most tragic part of all this is that PowerPoint Hell is eternal.
It does not matter where you work, what industry you’re in, or how much you beg for mercy—another meeting is always coming, another deck is always being prepared. The cycle never ends.
There is no salvation.
Only slide after slide after slide…
James Henshaw is a brooding Geordie export who swapped the industrial grit of Newcastle for the peculiar calm of Lincolnshire—though he’s yet to fully trust the flatness. With a mind as sharp as a stiletto and a penchant for science-tinged musings, James blends the surreal with the everyday, crafting blogs that feel like the lovechild of a physics textbook and a fever dream.
Equally at home dissecting the absurdities of modern life as he is explaining quantum theory with alarming metaphors, James writes with the wit of someone who knows too much and the irreverence of someone who doesn’t care. His posts are infused with a dark humour that dares you to laugh at the strange, the inexplicable, and the occasionally terrifying truths of the universe—whether it’s the unnerving accuracy of Alexa or the existential menace of wasps.
A figure of mystery with a slightly unsettling edge, James is the sort of bloke who’d explain the meaning of life over a pint, but only after a dramatic pause long enough to make you question your own existence. His wit cuts deep, his insights are sharp, and his ability to make the surreal feel strangely plausible keeps readers coming back for more.
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