What do you do if you have a technical malfunction during your presentation? The slide deck freezes up, the bulb burns out. You could have forgotten as I have to put the power cord in your laptop so your laptop powers down and the presentation isn't showing anymore. What do you do? My advice? Don't talk about it.
Just keep on going. Now, as you've heard me say in other parts of this course, you need to have your own paper outline of notes to follow for your whole presentation. So you never need the PowerPoint. Just keep going. If you forgot to put the power cord in as this happened to me, reached out, put it in, don't say, Oh my god, I'm such an idiot. I forgot to put the power cord in you may think that.
But don't say we don't want pity from the audience. We want them to focus on the ideas we have that are useful to them. So something doesn't work. Just keep on going if you can fix it easily fine. There's a tech person nearby, quietly mentioned to them to fix it. But don't whine don't complain.
Don't talk about poor little old me. Nothing's working right today. Just present and you'll leave the best impression with your audience.