Confessions of a Public Speaker (23 page)

Moscow, 1997. I was one of several speakers at a consumer
electronics company–sponsored “thank you” dinner in a magnificent
restaurant. Several important executives had flown in from Tokyo for the
evening.

Thirty seconds into my talk, the doors burst open and six
balaclava-hooded and heavily armed OMON troops (Moscow equivalent of a
SWAT team) moved into the room. They did not speak. Neither did
I.

Four of them occupied the corners of the room while two headed
directly for a table on the far side, AK-47s drawn. They grabbed a man
at the table, stood him up, and marched him out of the dining room. All
quiet, the remaining four sidled out.

I finished my talk. The Tokyo executives never returned to
Moscow.

After a long night of conference partying many years ago, I
overslept and woke up only moments before I was supposed to give a talk.
Not only did I have a killer hangover, I was fairly certain that I was
still drunk. I raced out of the hotel room in which I had fallen asleep,
horrified to realize that, at some point during the night’s adventures,
I had swapped my shirt for a new T-shirt that read, “I fuck like a
girl.” Given how late I was and how far away from my own hotel, I had to
go as-is. Before entering the conference hall, I decided that I needed a
cigarette. I walked up to a cute girl who was happy to offer me one.
Yet, after I took a deep inhale, I quickly realized that it wasn’t
filled with tobacco. Somehow, I still managed to give my talk. Luckily,
this was SXSW, a conference jokingly called spring break for geeks, and
many in attendance were wearing sunglasses to cover their own remnants
of the night before.

One of the few stories of a lecture killing someone comes straight
from the Bible.

“Seated in a window was a young man named Eutychus, who was
sinking into a deep sleep as Paul talked on and on. When he was sound
asleep, he fell to the ground from the third story and was picked up
dead. Paul went down, threw himself on the young man and put his arms
around him.”

While working at Microsoft, I flew all the way to Toronto to do a
demo during Steve Ballmer’s keynote for COMDEX Canada. The whole demo
was supposed to be five minutes. I walked on stage, clicked one button,
the demo machine started flashing and having a seizure, and 15 seconds
later I was headed off stage.

All that time and money spent for 45 seconds of public
humiliation. And of course, the picture on the front of the Toronto
paper the next day was of me and Ballmer laughing uncomfortably while I
was flailing. I’m sure he loved that the press decided that my 45
seconds were the most important part of his keynote.

Twenty-five-year-old Leonard Susskind was asked to give a talk at
the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. In the front
row were J. Robert Oppenheimer, Nobel Laureate T. D. Lee, and many other
notables. Susskind was young and terrified, and responded by being
overly aggressive and defensive. It was 1965, and at that time they used
opaque projectors, which were sandwiched between glass and projected by
a bright light on a screen. Famous physicist Marvin Goldberg asked a
question, and in trying to answer, Susskind got his red tie stuck in the
projector he was using to give the presentation, and it burst into
flames. Goldberg stood up, grabbed a glass
of water, and splashed Susskind in the face to put it
out.
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]

Back around 2004, I was running a presentation to the newly formed
New Zealand Chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association. The
room was full of geeks, web managers, consultants, and
librarian-types.

To introduce new and potential members to the organization, I
opened a web browser to call up the website and proceeded to type
http://www.upass.org
.

Unsavory things being done to butts flashed up on screen, followed
by gasps and laughter, some fainting, and one “Yahoo!” A quick Alt+F4
came in handy. Since then, all my presentations have had very high
turnouts, although a significant portion of the audience wears dark
shades.

The proper URL was
http://www.upassoc.org
.

Early last year, I was presenting at a user group. Partway through
the presentation, I noticed some of them giggling. One of them even left
the room briefly to regain composure. Fearing that it was something
about the way I was presenting, I started rushing things and having
mental blanks partway through sentences (hoping I wasn’t
that
boring). In between the muffled giggling, I
heard this deep, nasal breathing. Looking toward the source, I
discovered an older guy was actually asleep! I remarked, “Oh, we’ve got
a sleeper.” With that, the room erupted in laughter, waking the poor guy
up. He left the session embarrassed.

I felt really awkward about that whole presentation. I just hope
to God that the video isn’t lurking somewhere on the Internet.

I’m afraid many of my best stories are classified. But the gist is
the same: presenting at any kind of high-security facility is infallibly
a nightmare. Does your laptop have (a) WiFi, or (b) Bluetooth, or (c) an
integrated camera, or (d) a microphone, or (e) a USB port (into which
thumb drives may be inserted), or (f) an Ethernet or Firewire port, or
(g) a PC card slot, or…etc. If so, then it’s not coming through our
door. Basically, if it’s not a pure output device, we can’t admit it.
And no, you can’t bring the presentation in on a thumb drive. Mail us a
PDF of the slides, which we’ll “wash,” install on a secure server, then
our technician will run them for you from a locked room somewhere else
in the building. Oh, and never leave the direct line-of-sight of your
designated escort, because then (at best) it’s a rubber glove search for
you. And at worst? We might mistakenly shoot you.

Years ago I was a freelancer, hired to do talks and courses about
Microsoft Office technologies and programming. One morning, I was
traveling by train to start with a new group, and all circumstances were
against me. The Dutch railway system fucked up my schedule with so many
ridiculous problems, I couldn’t keep count. So I arrived half an hour
too late, and apologized for my lateness.

I then tried to repair my damaged image by making lots of jokes
and complaints about the Dutch railway system. (I thought that if
there’s one thing that unites an audience, it’s the sharing of
pain.)

Unfortunately, it turned out that this particular group was
working for, and sent by, the Dutch railway company. My reputation with
them never recovered.

In 1997, after I’d been working at the highly influential HotWired
website for a year or so, I went back to my alma matter to give a talk
to a web design class about working in the nascent web industry.

I stood in front
of the class and told what I thought were highly
entertaining stories about life at HotWired for a half-hour. When I
finally stopped and asked if anyone had questions, one hand meekly
raised in the back.

The question was, “What’s HotWired?”

I was traveling to FOSDEM in February 2006 on the Eurostar from
London. I was due to give the opening presentation in the Mozilla room
on the state of the Mozilla Foundation. The Foundation/Corporation split
had happened in mid-2005, so people were eager to hear what the future
held.

I arrived at Brussels Midi and decided to save a quid or two of
the Foundation’s money by taking the subway rather than a taxi. I went
down into the subway station and tried to buy a ticket. The ticket
machine utterly baffled me. After five minutes of trying, I turned round
in frustration to find that my wheeled luggage had been stolen. I had
lost everything except, praise God, my passport, wallet, and return
ticket, which were in my jacket pockets. But my suitcase, clothes, and
laptop—with my presentation for Saturday—were all gone.

Fortunately, I arrived early enough that I had time to go clothes
shopping. But the 45-minute talk had to happen from memory. These days,
I always take a cab to the hotel.

For my first major speaking engagement, I was to speak at COMDEX
on “Building Large-Scale e-Commerce Systems.” This was during the first
boom, before Amazon was #1, when scale was
very
hard. We’d done it, and folks wanted to hear about it.

I was flown to Chicago to give a 90-minute talk in a room that
could hold 1,200 people. It was empty, so I set up. As the time to speak
approached, I wasn’t sure why the room wasn’t filling up. I walked
around, checked the signage, confirmed the room number and time. There
was just a smattering
of people in the room. I figured I could start late if
something had happened.

The time to start came and went…five people in a room to hold
1,200! Was I going insane? I could hear the crowd outside—COMDEX
was
packed that year. I went into the hall, toward
the din, and saw him. Linus Torvalds (founder of Linux). Speaking in the
room across from the room I was speaking in. That room had standing-room
only, overflowing into the hallway.

I returned to my own 1,200-seat room, sat on the edge of the
stage, and delivered my talk to five attendees.

Standing up in front of 30 bright-eyed high school seniors the
first day back to school from the Christmas holidays in 1983 will stand
in my mind for all eternity. We used “chalk” back then, and I was at the
chalkboard doing one of my brilliant presentations about vector analysis
(I think I was as bored as my students) when I dropped the chalk. I bent
over to pick it up, and guess what? In short, I farted in class. It was
not an SBD (silent but deadly) but a real rip-roarer. I don’t really
know where it came from. I stood up and turned to the class to see the
astonished faces staring at me in disbelief. All I could think to say
was, “Excuse me.” Then we all cracked up. I threatened them with every
inch of their lives and told them I would fail anyone who uttered a word
of this to the outside. Yeah, it made the school paper the next week.
Took me the rest of the semester to live that down. When Facebook came
out, I hooked up with a bunch of my old students to see how they turned
out. Yep, they all reminded me of the incident. I think it was
permanently engraved on their brains forever.

In 1996, I was giving my first-ever conference presentation at a
workshop about quantum information held at the Santa Fe Institute in New
Mexico. I was 22 years old and very nervous, since the audience
contained many quantum information big shots. The talk went well, and I
got to the end. The audience clapped, and the Chair started to suggest
that we should break for lunch.

I say
started
because he didn’t complete what
he was saying. The spotlight
of attention having moved elsewhere, I decided to relax.
Unfortunately, I did this by starting to seat myself on the “table” that
had supported the overhead projector during my talk.

I say “table” because it looked superficially like a table, but it
actually didn’t have four legs for support. In fact, it was supported on
a single pillar, so nothing supported the edges. I sat down on an edge,
and the entire table collapsed, catapulting the projector all the way
over my body, now lying prone on the floor.