Nothing to See Here…

I think it’s because I have so many kids. I mean, when you are accustomed to NOBODY listening to a friggin’ word that comes out of your mouth at home, you really appreciate an audience of people who are there to hear you speak - who WANT to listen to what you have to say. It’s a nice change.

I think public speaking is the closest I can come to an orgasm without somebody touching my naughty bits.

So, you’d think I’d be THRILLED to be invited to speak at a conference for the local meeting planners association, right? Well, I was. Until I learned they wanted me for an HOUR.

Have you ever done public speaking? Five minutes feels like a week. Thirty minutes is a lifetime. An hour? I’m not sure I can do an hour. Gulp.

I don’t get to do much speaking in my current job. In my last job, however (you know, the one I got canned from after the dot com bubble burst?), I did it quite often. Speaking, presenting, and even solution demonstration. Now, when I talk about product demonstration, it might conjure up that wacky Lucille Ball doing her Vitameatavegamin routine. But this was a little more high tech. I was a solution consultant for a broad-based enterprise software for big companies. You know - to solve all their problems, automate their processes, cure cancer, and stop world hunger (we were REAL powerful back before the dot com bubble burst, weren’t we?).

So a big part of my job was to go into large corporations that had lots of money to spend. I would show them how our solutions could revolutionize their organization, make their bosses gasp with awe and admiration and throw money and promotions at them for buying such wonderful software from us. That sort of thing.

Except, if you know me, you’ll know that I only PLAY a corporate drone between 8 and 5 and that I’m pretty irreverent, even about my professional life. So when I would go in and do these solution demonstrations, I would mock up data (user data) in the software. And my faked up users were all characters from none other than the greatest TV show ever to exist in all the history of TV shows- Knot’s Landing.

Oh, sure, tell me I’m living in the past. Tell me to leave Abby and Val and Laura (god rest her soul) behind and to stop my love/hate thing over Greg Sumner and join the new millennium. But, no. I won’t.

For months, my demonstrations had faked up users named Abby Ewing and Mac Mackenzie and Greg Sumner and the rest of the gang. And in all those demonstrations, only ONCE did someone pick up on the Knot’s Landing connection. That’s how I knew I was so superior to all those people, focused on their “careers” and their “projects” and all that while there was a whole world of classic TV out there! Did they not know that re-runs of Knot’s Landing ran DAILY on the Soap Network? I think I might have gotten pregnant with my 4th for the sole purpose of getting a damned maternity leave and watch Laura’s funeral (was there EVER a sadder episode than the one when Laura died? Watching her read Goodnight Moon from the prerecorded videotape for baby Meg who would NEVER KNOW HER MOTHER… I mean, I’m crying just thinking about it, ya know?).

So what was I talking about?

Oh, yeah, public speaking. I know what you’re thinking “Dude, you just went off on a 20 minute tirade about Knot’s-fucking-Landing… a one hour speaking spot should be no problem for you.”

Perhaps you are right. I think I could make my living as a public speaker. I mean, sure, Plan A is that I’ll soon get rich and famous for my blogging, but I’ll keep the public speaking thing in my back pocket.

And if neither of those work out, well, I’ll always have Knot’s Landing reruns, right?

ps: I was going to put a Knot’s Landing image into this post, but when I googled it (Hi, toolbar, I love you!) and went to images, imagine my surprise! There was nothing worthy of the importance of that show! I’m severely depressed and I feel a little wee-bit old now. Sigh.