I had a twenty-minute college presentation and felt unusually prepared. Halfway through, the slide deck froze. I escaped to the desktop, opened my browser, and accidentally projected every tab I had used while preparing. The class could see searches for "how to pronounce entrepreneurial," "can eight slides last twenty minutes," and "how obvious is it when someone is reading speaker notes." There was also a tab titled "confident presentation body language" directly beside a playlist called "songs for panicking quietly." I closed the browser so quickly that I also closed the presentation. In the silence, the professor said, "For what it's worth, you pronounced entrepreneurial correctly." I finished from memory in eleven minutes. During questions, the first person raised a hand and asked whether the panic playlist was public. It had somehow become the most popular part of my research.
