Amsterdam: Pubic Speaking - Nov 2008

Here for a talk and workshop at a congress for Clinical Data Management. I don’t usually go that often to such conventions; rarely can I extract any new information or benefit from networking over coffee and cake, or falling asleep to a boring mumbling speaker. But this time I had put my foot in it, in that I’m the one who will be standing up and be the boring mumbling speaker and on top of that, I’ve committed myself to giving a workshop to boot!!

It started on my last day of work before my summer break back in June. I was just clearing up my desk and in a good mood, happy to get away for a rest, when the phone rang. One of the staff said there was an English speaking person whose name they didn’t understand who wanted to speak to me about something or other..

Usually at this point I usually roll my eyes, which is only for my benefit as the other end of the line can’t see me anyway. I knew it was someone trying to sell something:
1) Either a piece of print matter real-estate in the next glossy magazine (no, not that kind..) where we can have a full page spread in colour for so many thousand pounds/dollars/euros depending on where their tax haven is based,
2) or an invitation to a congress. With booth, talk (passive or active) and sponsoring for again a lot of currency,
3) or to take part online, in a virtual forum with the industry on the one side and us as service providers on the other. Depending on how much involvement the larger the invoice,
4) or a real world version of 3) in an exclusive location, where you have the opportunity to meet the industry for a one2one encounter to try and sell your wares in a 10 minute time slot. The industries answer to speed dating!

Usually the caller will began with pleasantries, at which point I normally shake any new sparing partner into action by interrupting them in their spiel with the loaded question ‘get to the bottom line - what’s it going to cost?’.
There is usually a pause. I can imagine the caller is srutinizing the check list in front of him/her to see how to handle this question so early in the game. And working out how to manipulate you into allowing them to complete the list before having to answer the question.
After a few ‘umms’ and ‘ahhs’ they are back on track and carry on as if you hadn’t said anything.

This doesn’t wash with me, I’ve other things to do, so I give them 30 seconds to talk. In the meantime I get on with my work picking up key words here and there so that I know what scenario (1-4 above) their on about. When the times up I hit them again in mid sentence with the same question. This time with the prefix ‘Ok, but I would still like you to..’.

If this doesn’t work they get a reprieve of a further 10 seconds and I end with ‘send me an email with the details’ and put the phone down. If they don’t have my e-mail or the companies then bad luck..
 Unfortunately they usually do.

So back to the call.
The chap I knew from the organisation of earlier conferences. He asked if I had a few minutes to give him feedback on what I would like to hear at the next conference in November, that is if I would be attending [Ed: He had no intention at the time], this caught me off guard and I rambled on about this and that. He thanked me, wished me a pleasant vacation and that was that. I didn’t think much about it until my return.

On the very first day he was back on the line! It was uncanny I wondered if he had a CCTV installed somewhere, anyway he caught me off guard again and after putting the phone down I realised I had committed myself to a 20 minute talk, podium discussion & a satellite workshop to the ‘this and that’ we discussed before my holiday!
Got to give it to him, very cleverly done and nicely manoeuvred.

And now I’m sitting here the talk behind me and the workshop tomorrow. As the workshop is for the complete day I have one of my colleagues UL with me. Really glad he's here, doing everything solo would not be good, we can take it in turns to talk and make sure everyone is 'entertained'. We killed a curry this evening without thinking about the possilbe consequences at the workshop, well we will know tomorrow evening.

The talk went well I’m told. I had so much material I wanted to get through, even after whittling it down to 30 slides (original 86), I still overran by nearly 10 minutes into the lunch break and nobody moved.  Which was because the doors were locked and so it wasn’t worth the embarrassment to try. I finialy broke the ban with the traditional last slide  ‘Any questions?’, to which the reply was a stampede to the buffet! Fortunately the doors where open by then otherwise there would have been a pile-up.
[Ed: Hint, try to avoid a time slot just before a break or the last of the day. The worse possible slot is the last talk of the congress! Watching them pack their cases, standup and leave is so a depressing distraction!!]
Possibly because you would want to leave too!
[Ed: Oh so true..]

I don’t really like to get up and talk in this way, this ‘me’ up on the stage and ‘them’ down, shall we say ‘in the pit’, is not interactive enough for my liking. Rather smaller groups and not the 150 from yesterday, rather more discussions than monologues. I always try and make a joke as soon as possible, it breaks the ice and I can see if I’m getting across and who’s still awake in the front row.

I was more apprehensive this time than most, in that I had to do the talk in English! This may seem crazy coming from an almost ex-native speaker, but although my German grammar is terrible I’m more fluent in it. When I do my sporadic teaching, all my slides are in English but I keep to German with injections now and then of English to keep them on their toes (or in this case awake).
Sometimes my classes ask me to talk in English [Ed: The default language in clinical research].
I try, but give up within the first 10 minutes due to too many pauses translating from German to English.
With this talk I was quite nervous until talking with the Frenchman who was on before me. I explained my nervousness to which he replied “It will be okay B, everybody here speaks bad English!”
That helped because it was true! The common English used at such international conferences is what you could call ‘simple’ apart from the specialised jargon; there are no complicated metaphors, idioms and slang, just enough “sticky words” to get your message across. If anything gets in the way of understanding it’s either the material and/or the attendee’s accents.

There was one speaker who broke the rules or shall we say was not speaking enough “bad English”. There may be some dispute here that it was not “not bad English enough” depending on where you were raised and educated. The chap was a pipe smoking professor from Loughbough University. You could not smell any tobacco but from where I was sitting the tell tail yellow stains on fingers and moustaches. The theme I must admit interesting but hardly understandable from the majority “in the pit”.
Not from content, but from how he phrased it. Someone who I imagined had no experience with talking to a continental audience about his work or anything else for that matter. It was not only the accent - something of an acquired taste - but every other sentence had either metaphors or idioms or both. Typical English! I looked around and have never seen so much collective bewilderment in so a high concentration! I had no problem, well a little bit; I asked my colleague if he understood anything.
The zombie stare was reply enough.

Blank looks reminds me of my time in the pathology in Cologne in the late seventies. We had a visit from a Japanese pathologist who gave a talk on his work in Japan (surprise). The director of the pathology knew he was going to talk in English and as they had a native speaker in house, the idea was that I could be on hand to ‘translate’ if need be.

I sat on one side a little way off from the 'esteemed colleagues' and waited for the talk. After primaries and introductions our guest began, within minutes I was getting hot around the collar. There was no way I could be an intermediary at the end of the session – not one word could I understand! The accent was so strong I could not follow him, the classical blue slides helped a little, but that was it! I noticed the collective bewilderment of my colleagues.

At the end there was a pregnant pause as no one wanted to be made to look a fool before the others, gradually small talk started and I made a tactical retreat. I heard nothing more about the German-Nippon connection or the lack of it for that matter.

[Ed: Anyone remember blue slides? Or lectraset for that matter, they had a department in the Uni. clinic that was only for taking and making blue slides as well as helping to put posters together, handcrafted masterpieces.]