I'm doing a lot of public speaking lately. Earlier this week, I had to give a presentation to almost the whole company, including the board of directors. Yowzzzzzzzza! I'd never met the board before, and I was a little afraid that if I made one slip-up, I'd wake up in a pine box outside of the Greyhound terminal in Istanbul. (Thankfully, they were very nice people.) Then, this Saturday, I'm going to talk at the Austin .NET Users Group Code Camp. What did/shall I present on? You don't want to know; both subjects are nerdy and boring to outsiders. I mean it. I could do half of one of my scheduled presentations, then fall asleep for the second half and you would leave the room saying, "Man, that really picked up there toward the end. Talk about going out on a high note!"
All of this activity is odd for two reasons. First, and most obviously, for someone who isn't very intelligent, I get an inordinate amount of chances to demonstrate this in public. Second, and also obvious, I have very few social skills. You could come up to me on the street a bunch of times and ask me the time, and maybe a third of those encounters, you'd actually get the time. The next 30%, I'd throw my shoes at you, and the final 40%, I'd tell you an inappropiate joke and then follow you for a block or two. I'm not going to charm the pants off of anyone but deranged homeless people, whose pants probably stink anyway.
Luckily, interacting with a bunch of people isn't the same as interacting with a single person. If a single person asks you a hard question, you're expected to answer it. If a person in a crowd asks you a hard question, you can say, "Ahhgghghg, a baby baboon with a knife! Quick, run everyone!" The crowd would start running, probably, and they'd take Mr. Questions with them. There are literally hundreds of thousands of ways not to answer questions when you're in a large group situation.
In conclusion, I present my secrets to public speaking: prepare, imagine everyone in the audience has a jheri curl, and station a drugged-up baby baboon in the back of the room before you start.
Posted by Cody at March 2, 2006 9:18 PM