Memorable moments: The projectile presentation

In 1992, for my final year of Marketing at the University of Cape Town, my friend Rory and I were assigned a presentation on the dark arts of merchandising. We wanted to be legends. We planned to reveal the "tricks of the trade"—how grocery stores put the bakery at the back to force you through the aisles, and how cereal boxes feature characters whose eyes are mathematically angled to lock onto a passing child’s gaze.

Since Google Images didn't exist, I spent days as a guerrilla photographer, snapping high-quality evidence of impulse-buy racks and strategically placed chocolates. We centered our entire grade on these visuals.

The day arrived. We set up my dad’s analog slide projector—a beast of a machine that required manual loading. We were so rushed we skipped a full technical rehearsal, but I was confident. I stood at the front, took a deep breath, and clicked the remote for the first slide.

CLACK-WHIZZZ!

Instead of appearing on the screen, the first slide popped up like a piece of overactive toast and went flying through the air, soaring over the heads of the third row.

Stunned, I pressed the button again. CLACK-WHIZZZ! The second slide followed suit, embarking on its own solo flight across the lecture hall. Rory scrambled to the back, frantically wrestling with the machine, but it had transformed from a projector into a high-velocity catapult.

Doing a visual-heavy presentation without a single image is a special kind of hell. I stuttered through descriptions of "imaginary" cereal boxes while my hard-earned research lay scattered on the floor among the feet of my peers.

Being a student with very high standards, I was devastated. But as we walked out, Rory just shrugged and chuckled and said, "Shit happens, Graeme. No one died."

Rory was right of course. Decades later, the grade is forgotten, but the image of my hard-earned research whizzing through the air like a plastic bird never fails to bring a chuckle. They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but in my experience, it often just makes you funnier. Even if it takes a few years to fully appreciate the joke.