My Worst Public Speaking Disaster– Ever!

If you’ve done any amount of public speaking, you’ve had at least one bad experience. For some people, it can be so traumatizing that they never again pick up a mike.

Mine was like a near-death experience, except without the lights and heavenly music. It happened in Toronto about twenty years ago.

At that time of my life I hung around with all the cool techie lawyers and had achieved some reputation as a legal road warrior. I was asked to present at a Law Society’s event at Osgoode Hall. The intent was that I would take the platform in front of 350 or so colleagues and wow them with the then very advanced technology of remote access. “How to Practice Law from the Airport Lounge” was my title. Pretty cool, right?

Honestly, the presentation truly was dazzling– a tour d’horizon of all the latest legal tech. But the real candy of the thing was a live demonstration. On a twenty foot screen, I would log into my Ottawa office, all while my less advanced brothers and sisters sat in rapt attention. History was going to be made, and I would be the hero. Razzmatazz, but good razzmatazz. (Remember, this was twenty years ago and the guy with a laptop and a smartphone was pretty cool.)

As you might imagine, I put an inordinate amount of time into this presentation. Lawyers are a tough, cynical and demanding audience at the best of times, and I took no chances.

One of the prime directives of public speakers is that you arrive early and check out the room and the technology, and I did. I knew that lecture theatre all too well and the sound guys answered all my questions.

Still, one more dry run never hurts, so I went up to the library to run it one last time, using my smartphone as a hotspot. It all worked like a dream. I could do this in my sleep— what could possibly go wrong?

Well, as it turned out, something could go wrong, something very simple but very critical. I couldn’t get internet access.

When I asked the two techies to get me internet access, they looked at each other, then at me, and said, “We don’t think we can do that.”

Remember, those were the days when you could drive down the street and access a hundred different open wifis. But the Law Society, clearly anticipating the Russians, had strapped things down pretty tight. To get internet access at Osgoode Hall, you had to be an employee, you had to fill in forms and go before a committee and swear an oath under the full moon and promise your firstborn. No shifty dude, especially one not from Toronto, was about to be granted such a weighty privilege on such short notice and without the proper formalities.

Luckily, I had a Plan B.

Plan B was even better: I could now demonstrate using my smartphone as a hotspot– remember, dear reader, that I’d already practiced this!

Except.

Except that the lecture theatre was so deep in the bowels of the earth that there was no phone signal to be had, at least in those days. None. Not even a bar.

So there you have it: a wannabe leading-edge demonstrator of remote lawyering with no ability to demonstrate. Nothing was going to work, and having been made to wait for twenty minutes or so, the crowd was in a lynching mood. For the next thirty minutes, with no visuals and in front of professional skeptics, I had to explain what it would look like if it did work. This was like distributing one fish to 350 hungry polar bears on a small ice floe. You get the picture.

Thirty minutes felt like thirty days. When it finally ended, someone came up with a perfunctory thank-you and a Law Society pen as a token of their deep gratitude.

I fled up the stairs and out of the building, still hearing the laughter as I sprinted across Queen Street.

Could I have made it work? Perhaps a Plan C? Maybe, but more likely not. What I can do, however, is take lessons from it.

The real lessons are threefold: first, remember that no matter how much you prepare, sometimes it will blow up in your face, and you just have to deal with it. Sometimes you may be able to pull out a moral victory, other times you just want to pull out a Smith & Wesson. No matter, there will be times when you just can’t rescue the thing. Accept it.

Second, as long as you are on the stage, you can’t be seen to whimper or snivel or blame anybody else. You have to be, as they say in Yiddish, a mensch. Your little reputation may be bruised for a day or two, but your big reputation is what matters.

Third, you need to pick yourself up and get back in the game. This kind of stuff only comes around once or twice in a lifetime, and the odds are really good that your next time up on stage everything will work exactly as planned, maybe even better.

Life is the long game– play it well.