What can you learn about public speaking from a garbageman in a cartoon strip?

(Click on each Dilbert cartoon to see the third frame with the punch line). Important things like:

First impressions of others (speaker or audience) may be wildly wrong.
 
Your technology may not really be state-of-the art.

Wisdom can come from unexpected sources.


At an Air Force Reserve summer camp back in the mid-seventies, I noticed that everyone, including the hospital commander (a colonel), seemed to defer to one female tech sergeant. She apparently was just a medic like me.

When I asked someone why, they told me that during the week she was the nurse supervising the entire emergency room at the Ohio State University hospital! She’d met her husband while on active duty, and then later gone on to nursing school for her RN. By then she’d been too old to get a commission as a reserve officer.

This blog was inspired by a recent blog post about a tattoo artist.