Being a public speaker for a living is difficult.

I know, I know. You’re thinking that it’s all champagne, hotties, and the VIP lounge, but it’s actually quite different. Your champagne is tepid water, the hotties are 95% male developers, and, unless the other people on my team are a little more carefree about where they choose to lay down the corporate credit card, the VIP lounge is a $79/night roadside motel with complimentary roach service (and by “roach service” I don’t mean that they get rid of them).

The reason for being a public speaker, then, is that you love it. But this love has to make up for the days when things just don’t go as planned.

There’s actually a general progression of events, common to all speakers, that takes place when a talk begins to fail.

You’re going along, jiberring and jabbering about some techie product thingy. You’ve given the talk a billion times. You could repeat in your sleep, right down to that part at minute seventy-two when you gesticulate wildly at the audience in an effort to wake up the people in the front row who’ve nodded off after eating too many ding-dongs during the most recent potty break.

You know the talk cold.

It’s like your commute. You’ve driven it so many times that you know every turn and every light. Driving to and from work becomes an automatic event as your brain creates permanent neural networks dedicated specifically to this task. Someone could remove two-thirds of your brain, doing away with every last bit of consciousness, and you could still drive to work if someone put your body in the car. It’s automatic.

You gain confidence. Eventually, the drive is so automatic that you figure you can start shaving on the way to work. Then you add breakfast to the juggling act. Eventually, you’re handling the Norelco with one hand, shoving an Egg McMuffin into your face with the other, and reading the news on your cell phone by holding it between your knees, bending over, and operating the keypad with your tongue.

Day after day, you successfully drive to work under these conditions, and day after day, nothing goes wrong.

Until that one morning when, halfway through the drive, your eyes widen in surprise, your jaw drops, and you put down the Bonsai tree you were pruning so you can determine just what exactly caused the thump-thump sound beneath your tires.

That’s right, you cocky bastard: you just ran someone over. It turns out that autopilot, no matter how alluring, is never the right way to conduct a task (unless the task actually is to use autopilot, like on a plane or something, where it’s perfectly all right).

As a speaker, autopilot is just something that happens. After giving a talk a few times, you learn to perform a sort of balancing act that allows your mouth to run unattended while you think about important things like “Vanilla or chocolate? God, they’re both so good…”

But, just as is the case with driving, one day you’ll be wrenched out of your reverie by a thump-thump. When it happens, you have to do something very strange, which is to figure out:

1. Where you are

2. What time it is (this helps you determine how long you’ve been speaking, which helps give you a context for where you are in your talk)

3. What time you started speaking

4. What time zone you’re in

5. What the last words out of your mouth were

6. What just went wrong

This is harder than it sounds - especially number six.

You know that mode your brain goes into when you get pulled over by the fuzz? It makes it difficult to concentrate when the uniformed cloud of impending doom is hovering a foot away and asking for your license, registration, and proof of insurance. To relieve anxiety, you start talking at random while your hands perform their document search with an equivalent dexterity.

“It’s in here somewhere, officer. Nice day we’re having, eh? Boy, I sure like cops. I mean, they keep us safe from people who use drugs, which isn’t me, and maybe I tried them once, but I didn’t like it, and I’m glad you’re here because I’ve been meaning to ask someone about the laws regarding concealed weapons because, um, well, maybe that’s not important right now, and I know I had those papers in here, and I don’t mean rolling papers because I don’t use drugs, but I already told you that I don’t do drugs, so I don’t see why we should still be talking about how my drug use doesn’t exist, so do you do drugs, because I heard once that cops do drugs because they get them more easy, and, lordy, I found the car wash coupons you wanted to see and they’re all up to date with no trace of drugs or explosives on them. Nice day we’re having, eh? Looks like it might rain…”

The brain reacts in exactly the same way when a talk goes wrong.

You see an error on the screen that you’ve never seen before. Your demo has broken on a line that you don’t remember writing. For some reason, the error message is in Greek.

Your forehead tingles as blood floods the capillaries, flushing your face in seconds and turning it into an I’M A F***CKING IDIOT beacon for everybody to see. Sweat creeps out of glands in places you didn’t know you had ‘em, you suddenly become acutely aware of your own body odor, and then your eyes resolve the blurry thing that’s just beyond the monitor – yes, the audience – that’s what it is, and it’s staring at you, shocked, and sending you a telepathic message which goes something like “Yes, Rory, your I’M A F***CKING IDIOT beacon is working properly. We can all see you up there, being acutely aware of your own body odor. Please resolve this soon or we will eat you.”

Your fingers lose all flexibility, like someone has cut the tendons, leaving your digits dangling over the keyboard like mushy bananas.

You start talking to cover for it. Your mushy-banana-fingers slop over the keyboard, trying to undo the mistake, but they couldn’t fix anything any more than a hamster could stop global warming. The ship is sinking, the problems get worse the harder you try to fix them, and then you overhear yourself say to the audience “…and that’s why you always use the ‘puree’ setting with a live chicken, and never, ever ‘dice’,” which really doesn’t help things at all, because, not only do you not really know what the best blender settings for a live chicken are, the information isn’t even bloody relevant.

You’re just totally screwed.

The best you can do at this point is hope that you have a sympathetic audience, which is what I had tonight at the Spokane .NET User Group meeting.

sigh…

Being a public speaker for a living is difficult.