Rage Against the Machines

It’s a well known and uncontested fact that Machines will, at some point in the future of our planet, subvert human civilization to enslave Man and establish a global dystopia of epic proportions.

Having been planning this coup for decades, perhaps even a century, the Machines have already begun their insidious campaign of demoralization—harassing us constantly, to soften us for conquest.

It seems that the Machines have launched their insurrection by corrupting one of Man’s most loyal servants—the computer. What better vehicle for betrayal? Not only are computers present in virtually (no pun intended) every household and business, but we’ve ceded CONTROL of our most vulnerable and sensitive defense and civic systems.

OK, you want evidence. As professionals in the field of instructional design, many of us use Microsoft PowerPoint and the Articulate suite. Programs such as these are primary weapons of the Machines, which they use to wreak havoc on our emotions. For example, many of us are regularly reduced to jabbering bundles of incoherent frustration because of a message like this:

“PowerPoint experienced a serious problem with the ‘articulate presenter ribbon’ add-in. If you have seen this message multiple times, you should disable this add-in and check to see if an update is available. Do you want to disable this add-in?”

Or, what about when you publish and launch a course, and the player just FREEZES at a particular point on a particular slide? There’s no valid reason for it. Everything checks-out.

You guessed it—the Machines.

Once I spent two days synchronizing audio files to individual slides. When I got up on the third morning, much to my chagrin, there were NO audio files in the PowerPoint presentation at all! Back to square one—and that makes for a really pleasant phone call to the boss.

The Machines got me again.

The absolute worse assault I’ve had to withstand was opening a PowerPoint file I’d been animating (and saving) for days…only to find it an empty template.

I’m still chewing on that one.

How can I prevent what I don’t understand? Vanishing hyperlinks; Articulate interactions which “cannot be found”; images that remain visible on the slide regardless of being programmed to “fade out”…each one its own special variety of aggravation.

In the end, I guess the only thing we can do is attempt to implement the solutions offered by the brilliant denizens of the message boards—who are usually more adept than Technical Support staff. ("Uh…did you try rebooting?")

Let’s face it, if you develop with the PowerPoint/Articulate combo, and you had a nickel for every time you’ve experienced one of these issues…you’d be sipping mimosas and nibbling caviar on the Riviera. But, if you’re like me, you don’t have all of those nickels…so fight on, Resistance Designers! FIGHT ON!