Why I love training classes

Because apparently you can just walk right in and lose your mind. Whew. This particular all day torture was on "Effective Presentations Skills". Basically a one day Toastmasters Session, only more dysfunctional. 14 people, varied backgrounds. No babes, dammit (ha). Even so, it wasn’t a total loss. There was much humor. And I surely needed some of that on the Monday after Goodfellows. Whew.

In between all the babbling and lecture portions, there were 3 presentation periods. During the 1^st two ‘rounds’ the idea was simple – impromptu speaking. This is where you walk up to the front of the room, grab an index card with a topic on it, and turn around and start talking to a bunch of semi-strangers about this random topic for one minute.

Having done this before I wasn’t scared. Again I failed to heed Master Yoda, "You will be. You *will* be" and paid the price for it. The first part was actually easy – there were only 3 topics: What did you do on Thanksgiving?, What are your Holiday plans? and Describe your commute. Sadly enough, it went downhill early.

"We did something new, we didn’t visit family. So we made our own meal. We hadn’t done this before and frankly I’m not a good cook. The turkey wasn’t all that good, but it didn’t matter because there was a lot of alcohol involved!" Hello, nurse! Ok, a little politically incorrect, but all seemed fine. Someone else referred to alcohol and we found out that two people live right next door to the plant. Odd.

This was nothing compared to Ms Tell-it-all’s story. After claiming she was extremely nervous speaking in front of people and may actually vomit, she proceed to tell us of her Holiday Plans. Take self and daughter to see Granma, leave kid there, go to CA for a must needed restful week.

Ok, cool.

Where she would meet her California boyfriend and immediately fall asleep. He wouldn’t like this at first, buthe would have to deal. Then they would do the normal stuff: dinner out, movies, some dancing, and of course..

TIME!

Hello! Blushing she was. The room was laughing. Worse, it turns out she hadn’t breathed the entire time (which our instructor actually let go longer than a minute because we all wanted to hear this!).

Round 2.

After more BS talking and slides, we get to Rnd 2. Same format. Feeling confident, our first contestant walks right up and grabs…

Pickles

WTF?

So this round was a little tougher than the last, but not horrible.

Until Ms Tell-it-all went up there and grabbed…

Handcuffs

The room exploded. But it was far, far worse than the sexual innuendoes we were imagining.

"[I remember handcuffs because I had been in them. Once I was dating a guy who was married, but I didn’t know that at the time. I went over to his house one day and found out he was married. So I went right up and beat him up. I beat him for all the women out there who had ever been cheated on. Finally the cops came and started yelling and asking what happened. I told them he hit me first, he started it, but then he said something and I hit him in the jaw so they had to arrest me. Put the cuffs on me, and took me to jail."

TIME!

Holy crap, Batman!

Later there was a reference to the Full Monty (directed at me!).

That Yoda sure has some good advice.

Clay "You’re damn right I’m scared" Berry