Presentation Pressure

For all the claims of how productive a computer has made us, have you ever pondered how much time we wasted booting, rebooting, printer problems, network problems ......... the list goes on and on.  I have no less than 9 different wires for various purposes in my laptop briefcase for device connectivity. How many presentations have been foiled by the challenge of knowing which two function keys to hit simultaneously to get the screen to appear?  How often has what you thought you printed - actually printed as you desired?  Have I hit your stress button yet (since in these cases there is no easy button).

For my family, I am technical support.  I know just enough to be dangerous and waste hours of time.  Tonight I looked furiously for an extra printer cable (their have been at least 5 versions of this that I can distinctly remember ....... does serial and parallel ports for dot matrix printer ring a bell).  I needed that wire (not one of the 9 I had with my laptop)  so I could direct connect the networked printer at our house to my computer to get something simple printed for a presentation (naturally the network was down).

There must be a corollary of Murphy''s law - if not call it Garen's Law -  "When you are in the greatest hurry to print - something will go wrong with the printer"

So what is the solution?   Use a Flipchart for all presentations --- or carry 10 wires with my laptop.