Will your introducer have a meltdown?

A speaker occasionally will encounter an unprofessional introduction. When drinks are served with an evening meal, the introducer for the after-meal speaker may be slightly incoherent. Sometimes the introducer even may be completely incoherent, and melt down like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz.

Paul Tobey, a Canadian pianist and motivational speaker, tells a story about this type of a public speaking nightmare in Toronto. The introducer rambled on for over twenty minutes, never did a proper introduction, ignored hand signals, and finally stopped when the audience began heckling loudly. She didn’t just have issues – she had a whole subscription. Most people handling introductions display a lot more common sense.

That story beats the one I mentioned last November about a professor being introduced as having killed one of her advisers!