"One holiday season while I was at Bell-Northern Research, I got a call
on Christmas Eve from the boss of my boss's boss, the head of the
U.S. subsidiary for all the U.S. labs. He told me that he was
committed to give a talk as part of a keynote panel at a large
telecommunications conference to be held immediately after New Year in
a city far away, but unfortunately he was ill and wouldn't be able to
go. Would I go and make the address for him? Thanks very much. Oh, and
he had not yet prepared his talk, so I would have to take care of
that, too. Thanks again.
"I had no choice but to do the talk, so over the holiday week, I put
together something to say (about communication in future wide-area
networks of personal computers, I'm sure). I had no way to prepare any
visuals except overheads--BNR didn't use a service bureau like
Genigraphics, we used our corporate art department in Ottawa to make
35mm slides, and there was no chance to do that over the holidays. I
thought overheads would be okay. (I didn't know it then, but what I
should have done was to call Genigraphics, who had made an excellent
business of working all night, even over holidays, to save the skins
of CEOs who hadn't prepared in time, and of charging very robust rush
premiums for such service. I'm sure that, when I sent the extremely
large bill to the same big boss who palmed his keynote panel off onto
me, he would have approved my expenses without question.)
"I took a red-eye and arrived at the big conference on the day after
New Year. I found the producers who were holding a rehearsal for the
panel at which I was to fill in. It turned out that the auditorium
would hold several thousand people. There were several other speakers
who had proper 35mm slides, and the auditorium had high-end projection
of 35mm slides from an acoustically sealed projection booth high in
the back wall. They had apoplexy when I showed them my overhead
transparencies and said that I intended to use them.
"But the session was the next day, and we were all wedged. The
producers rented an extremely bright industrial overhead projector,
and jury-rigged it in the middle of their stage set where it stuck out
like a sore thumb. Since I had to change the overheads by hand, I also
had to talk from the middle of the set, instead of from the podium at
one side where the proper microphones were. My overheads were severely
distorted into a "keystone" shape because of the angle necessary to
reach the giant screen large enough for thousands of people to
see. (This problem has gone away with digital projectors that can
distort images to counteract keystoning; the 35mm slides were fine, of
course, since the screen over the stage was level with the projection
booth located at the back of the hall.)
"The rehearsal didn't go smoothly. Afterward, I worked hard on
practicing my talk overnight.
Depend upon it, Sir, when any man knows he is to be hanged in a
fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
--Samuel Johnson, 19 September 1777
"The next day, at our performance, another speaker gave the first talk,
speaking from a podium at one side, with a spotlight on him and a
hidden microphone, using excellent professional 35mm slides. Then my
turn: I walked from the panel's seating area to the middle of the
lighted stage, got my temporary microphone, put my first overhead on
the projector, looked back at the distorted trapezoid, and tried to
convince several thousand people that my view of the future of
telecommunications was worth listening to.
"Even allowing that it may not have been the best talk I ever gave,
it should have been passable; it was on a topic I understood, felt
passionate about, and had presented on many important occasions. But
I certainly did not get a warm reception for my ideas from the huge
audience. The session chairman and the other panelists ridiculed
what I had to say and treated me like a fool."