Talk like an Egyptian

Eventually speakers will encounter rooms with a variety of proportions and challenges. We just have to learn to grin and roll with the punches. On July 1 Lisa Braithwaite blogged about coping with a very deep, narrow training room, almost like a lane in a bowling alley.

Once I got the very opposite - a wide, shallow room. A technical society held their dinner meetings in the party room at a restaurant. The member who brought the Carousel slide projector grabbed the wrong case, which contained a long focal length lens designed for a much larger room. To get an image to focus, the projector had to be in the back right corner of the room with the screen in the front left corner.

As usual the remote control for slide advance and focus was on a long cord, but not quite long enough to reach the screen. When I tried to point to a slide, I wound up with both arms outstretched awkwardly. My right arm with the pointer was high in the air, and my left with the remote was low. This is the famous hieroglyphic dance pose from the video for the Bangles 1986 hit song Walk Like an Egyptian. It clearly was time to give up and let someone in the audience run the projector.