In the spring of 2006, I was twenty-five years old, out of work as an electrician because of a back injury, and sitting in a basic computer class at Shoreline Community College because retraining meant starting somewhere. The class was CIS 105, 8:30 in the morning, in one of those computer labs where every student had a desktop station and the room felt less like a classroom than a very tightly packed office where nobody had chosen to work together. By that point I already knew computers well enough that most of the course felt beneath me. I had been taking machines apart for years, I had been blogging since 2000, I had played with PowerPoint long before anyone at Shoreline decided I needed to learn what a slide transition was, and the instructor had a habit of using terminology that made me feel like I had accidentally wandered into a textbook from a previous decade. She called web developers “Web Weavers.” I cannot overstate how much this bothered me. Somewhere around the end of the PowerPoint unit, though, she gave us an assignment that finally gave me something I could sink my teeth into: make a presentation. I heard that assignment as: make a ten-minute presentation.

She had actually said ten slides.

I have no idea how my brain converted “ten slides” into “ten minutes.” I wish I had a satisfying explanation, but I don’t. Maybe there was a paper handout I barely looked at because I already knew how to use PowerPoint. Maybe she said it once and I stored the wrong unit in my head with absolute confidence. What I do know is that I spent the days leading up to the assignment thinking a ten-minute presentation was a ridiculous amount of work for a basic computer class. There were probably around twenty students in the room, and I remember doing the math and deciding that apparently we were going to spend several class periods listening to everybody talk. It felt excessive, but not excessive enough for me to stop and ask if perhaps I had misunderstood something. This is a recurring feature of my brain: once I decide what the assignment is, I tend to take that assignment very seriously. Heidi once asked me to clean the stove and was startled when I deep-cleaned the thing because she had meant something more like “wipe it down.” I have learned over the last twenty years to ask clarifying questions. Twenty-five-year-old me had not yet learned this lesson.

I also procrastinated, because ten minutes sounded like a lot. Then, the night before it was due, inspiration finally arrived in the form it usually did for me: all at once, with no respect whatsoever for bedtime. I decided to do the history of the captains of the Enterprise. Not a list of actors. Not a fan presentation about which captain was best. A history lecture. That distinction mattered to me because the entire joke depended on treating Star Trek’s fictional history with complete academic seriousness. The title alone tells you where my head was: A Brief Timeline on The History of The Captains of the Enterprise Starship Vessels. That is not the title of a person trying to be concise. I sat at home in front of my black computer and CRT monitor, both stuffed inside the enormous computer cabinet we owned at the time, hunched in that box for hours and had an absolutely wonderful time. I already knew most of the timeline because I was a giant Star Trek nerd and had been for years. I had owned a Star Trek Encyclopedia since high school and loved the way it treated the fictional universe like an actual historical record. Memory Alpha supplied details and, very obviously when you look at the slides now, a whole lot of images. I researched as I went, wrote narration, built slides, and kept following the history where it led me.

The presentation begins with Zefram Cochrane, which was absolutely intentional. Star Trek: First Contact had already been my favorite Star Trek movie for years. I saw it in the theater when I was sixteen with my Aunt Donna, who did not even particularly like Star Trek, and one of the things I still remember from that screening is a guy in the audience getting genuinely upset when Picard cried. He threw his arms up and loudly complained that Picard was not supposed to cry, which I knew was wrong because Picard had absolutely cried before. The whole memory is fused together for me now: Donna being there, my love of the movie, and this stranger being offended by Jean-Luc Picard having emotions. First Contact also gave me a perfect historical frame. Cochrane makes the first warp flight, the Vulcans arrive, and centuries of Starfleet history eventually lead to Picard chasing the Borg back through time to save Cochrane’s first warp flight. The future literally folds back into the beginning. So I knew the presentation needed to start with Cochrane and come all the way around to him again.

Inside that loop, I tried to include everybody. Jonathan Archer gets his history, Christopher Pike gets his history, Kirk gets his history, Harriman gets his history, Rachel Garrett gets her history, Picard gets a lot of history because Picard was my captain, and the Enterprise itself gets treated like a character because of course it is one. Enterprise-D has always been my ship. The Next Generation was my show. I missed some of the earliest seasons when they first aired, but by the later years I watched it religiously, often with my mom, who recently reminded me that as a kid I would make her stop moving around the house, sit down, rest, and watch “all the spacey shows” with me. She got into TNG too. She also bought me Star Trek Hallmark ornaments every Christmas for years, and those ships and characters eventually migrated onto my own family tree after I moved out. I still have them. So when I made this deck, I was not choosing a random nerd subject. I was building a little history of something that had already been woven through my family life, my childhood, and the way I understood myself.

Picard was the destination. I was working toward him the entire time. I knew more about Picard than the other captains, loved him more than the other captains, and the presentation expands when it reaches his era. I loved that he was poised, intelligent, curious, interested in archaeology, stern when he needed to be but never casually cruel, and always more interested in the why than the how. I still admire the character, and the older I get the more I appreciate what Patrick Stewart brought to him. Kirk is not there as an opposite to Picard; he is there because he comes before Picard, and because Kirk has the extraordinarily useful comedic distinction of dying twice. In the presentation he dies in the Nexus disaster, earning an R.I.P. slide, and then much later Picard enters the Nexus and discovers him, producing a slide that simply says “Not Dead.” Two slides after that, Kirk dies for real and gets another R.I.P. This is exactly my sense of humor. So is the aside about Cochrane being twenty-nine but looking “a lot older probably due to excessive drinking and stress.” I was making the presentation for the class, technically, but the comedy was for me. I knew perfectly well that most of the people in that room were not going to care about the historical continuity of the Enterprise. I cared, and I thought it was funny, and that was enough to make the whole thing worth doing.

The actual presentation

This is the surviving version of The History of The Captains. I would not change a pixel of it now. The fonts, the image quality, the spacing, the awkward transitions, the entire 2006 PowerPoint-ness of it are part of the artifact.

Part of the assignment was learning PowerPoint’s speaker notes and the dual-screen presentation setup, so I wrote narration to go with the slides and read from the notes while the class saw the deck. A separate narration document survived too, and looking at it now I think I finally understand why it existed outside PowerPoint: I was almost certainly using it to rehearse the presentation and make sure I could fill the required ten minutes. I remember timing myself. I probably used some little online timer because I was an early-Gmail, always-online sort of nerd and that sounds exactly like something I would have done, but I do not remember the specific timer and I am not going to pretend I do. What I do remember is the important part: I kept discovering that I needed more. More narration, more context, more connective tissue, because I had to hit ten minutes. At some point I even thought, this feels like kind of a lot for an intro computer class, and somehow that thought still did not cause me to revisit the premise. I simply expanded the presentation until it satisfied the assignment I believed I had been given.

Heidi was home while I built it, and I am almost certain she became the first audience once I had the thing finished. She was not as much of a Trekkie as I was, but she knew me, she got the jokes, and she was excited about what I had made. That private rehearsal is important because it means the presentation did, in fact, work in at least one room. The next morning I took it to Shoreline on a floppy disk, walked into class, and volunteered to go first. Of course I volunteered to go first. As far as I knew, we were about to spend several class sessions listening to ten-minute PowerPoints from everybody else, and I had this ridiculous thing I had stayed up building and was excited to unleash. I also had no friends in the class. Most of the students stayed at their computers. The teacher was really the only person paying close attention. I stood there with my notes and my lovingly constructed timeline and started teaching a room full of people who had not asked for the history of the Enterprise.

And I kept going.

Eventually the teacher interrupted me and asked, “How much longer are you going to go?” This was confusing because, from my perspective, I was doing exactly what she had assigned. I only had a few slides left. I had practiced this. I knew my timing. I was nearly there. It was around this point that the horrible truth finally emerged: she had asked for ten slides, not ten minutes. Suddenly the entire room made sense. Suddenly the assignment made sense. Suddenly the arithmetic made sense. We were not going to spend several days on presentations. She had expected everyone to get through them in one class period. I had somehow taken a basic PowerPoint exercise and turned it into a meticulously timed historical lecture containing roughly seventy slides of Star Trek continuity.

She was not amused.

I was totally embarrassed while I was still standing there, because there is no graceful way to discover in public that you have created an order of magnitude more PowerPoint than anyone asked for. For a second I considered trying to finish anyway because I was so close, but the room was dead and I knew when to stop. She cut me off. I packed it up. I walked out. And almost as soon as I was physically out of the classroom, I started dying laughing, because the entire thing was instantly, unmistakably, perfectly funny. I did not need twenty years of distance to turn the embarrassment into a story. The story was funny from the beginning. That has always been how I experience my own life. I grew up in a house full of laughter, and my dad in particular was constantly making jokes, telling stories, teasing, bringing home dumb jokes he had heard at work, making the telling itself funny because he was so animated. Sometimes now I hear his voice in mine, or I laugh and sound exactly like him. I have always found myself hilarious. By the time I was writing Adam At Last at twenty, self-deprecating humor was already one of my default modes, not because I can trace it to some secret trauma I was shielding myself from, but because my family laughed and I learned to include myself among the available material. The Captains story did not become funny later. Twenty-five-year-old me walked out of that classroom already laughing with forty-five-year-old me.

There is one more detail that makes the interruption almost impossibly perfect: she stopped me before the ending. The surviving deck comes full circle to Cochrane and the Vulcans and then ends like a normal PowerPoint, but the version I actually built had one more joke waiting beyond that final slide. I had set up a hidden link so that advancing out of the presentation would kick the audience over to YTMND and play the Captain Picard song. This was 2006. YTMND was part of the internet’s nervous system. I knew that page well enough that years later I was still dropping the exact link into chats with friends. The intended ending was picard.ytmnd.com. I was one or two slides away from it when she stopped me. I never got to the joke.

That may be my favorite part now.

If she had let me finish, maybe this would still be a funny story. If she had stopped me afterward and said, “You misunderstood the assignment, but this was incredible,” it might even be a sweet story. But it would not be this story. Her complete lack of amusement is essential. She is the straight man. The whole thing lives and dies with her. Twenty years later I would genuinely love to show her the deck, not to prove that she was wrong or to demand retroactive appreciation, but to tell her that she accidentally provided one of the best bits of comedy I have ever been handed. She had no idea what she was interrupting, and neither did I. If she had validated me in the moment, she would have taken the air out of a story that has gotten funnier every time I have told it since.

What makes it stranger is that the thing survived. I do not have all of my old files from that era. I lost enormous amounts of stuff that I wish I still had. Somehow this one remained. At some point, when Google was introducing its own presentation software, I apparently decided this old PowerPoint was exactly the thing I wanted to use to test it. That choice feels important. The survival was partly luck, but it was not entirely random. I picked this presentation because I already thought it was good. I already loved the story attached to it. Later I reused it again while teaching myself HTML and CSS, trying to build a version of my old Wygle Wide Web that looked like an actual TNG-era LCARS database. I was writing the code from scratch in a plain text/CSS interface, probably through Tumblr, figuring out rounded shapes and hunting down the right hex values because “kind of Star Trek-looking” was not good enough. I wanted it to feel like a real LCARS terminal. At one point I was trying to fold this presentation into that site too. I do not remember whether I ever got the embed working, but I remember the impulse perfectly: of course this ridiculous Star Trek history artifact belonged inside the fake Star Trek computer database I was hand-building for fun.

Looking at it now is a one-two punch. I love the Star Trek of it. I still love Picard. I still love Enterprise-D. I still love First Contact. I still think the “Not Dead” slide followed shortly by another R.I.P. is funny. But I also love how completely twenty-five-year-old me is preserved inside the thing. I love how nerdy I was. I love how hard I committed. I love that I ADHD’d the directions so thoroughly that I accidentally created a huge artifact with complete purpose. The size of the thing was a mistake; almost everything inside the mistake was deliberate. Once my brain decided the assignment was ten minutes, I was going to give that teacher ten goddamn minutes. I was going to research it. I was going to rehearse it. I was going to use speaker notes correctly. I was going to build an actual historical arc. I was going to start with Cochrane, work my way through generations of captains and Enterprises, arrive at Picard, send Picard back through time, close the loop, and then surprise everybody with a stupid Captain Picard song on YTMND. I accidentally built the wrong-sized thing and then intentionally made the wrong-sized thing excellent.

There is no embarrassment left in it for me. There really never was much once I got out of the room. It is too perfect of a story. What could have been “the time I misunderstood an assignment and made an ass of myself” became something I completely own. I was misunderstood in the room, but I was already in on the joke before I got home. I am not laughing at that kid now. I am laughing with him. He thought this whole thing was hilarious from the get-go, and he was right.

For years I have thought this would make a perfect Ignite talk, except an Ignite talk is five minutes and, as history has already established, I blew past that limitation twenty years ago. The proper version would require two slots back-to-back. I would need about a minute to explain the setup at high speed: I was twenty-five, retraining after an injury, taking an intro computer class, and I misunderstood my teacher. I heard ten minutes when she said ten slides. Then I would say the only line that really matters: “So, for the next ten minutes, let me tell you about the captains…” And then I would make a huge captive audience finally sit through the thing exactly as intended. No modernization. No redesign. I would not touch a pixel. This time I would get to the last slide. This time I would click forward. This time Captain Picard would sing. I would probably be laughing and crying at the same time, and then I would bow and walk off.

Twenty years is a long time to wait for a punchline.