I had a few embarrassing public speaking moments during my Microsoft tenure, and a few during college, too, but one that stands out in my memory a lot happened all the way back in my senior year of high school.

I was the class president, and it was the first day back from summer vacation; our first day as seniors. There was a welcome assembly, and the Vice Principal said I could make a short speech to the class after he said his parts. “OK” I thought, “no preparation, but I’m sure I can come up with something.” So I sat there for a little while thinking about my audience and I assumed it was my job to say something inspirational about how great this year was going to be.

Anyway, when I got up on stage I tried to set a serious tone. I said something like “This is it. Our last year in this school. Our last chance together to have a winning football season, or work for the grades we’ve been striving for. Our last chance to learn together as a class, and help each other out. Our last homecoming. Our last prom. Our last chance to party. Next year we’ll go off to college or to new jobs and leave high school behind. So let’s make the the most of it. Let’s make this year the best one yet.”

The reaction from my classmates was good and I remember feeling good about doing a decent job without preparation.

Then about 30 minutes later after the assembly was over I found myself in the Vice Principal’s office for a chat. “I want to talk to you about your speech,” he said. “Yeah, they seemed to like it,” I replied, still pretty chipper. Then I noticed he was frowning. After the pause, he continued, “why did you say “it’s our last chance to party?” “What were you trying to do?”

That’s when I realized I had more than one audience in the crowd that day. I hadn’t given one whit of thought to the fact that I should have been speaking with BOTH in mind.

Can’t get much worse than this: soaking my shorts before my 1st conference talk. Other bad experiences?

Well, I was talking with some people recently about someone who had a bad experience giving their first talk at a scientific conference. And so I said – you think that is bad – how about this? And I told them the story below. But before telling the story I am asking here for others to post comments about the worst thing that has happened to you during a talk at a scientific conference/meeting. Please fire away.

OK – so my talk. It was 1995. The SSE (Society of the Study of Evolution) meeting was in Montreal. And somehow I was going. I am not sure anymore how I ended up registering for the meeting. I do remember other evo-grad students who were or had been at Stanford like David Pollock, Joanna Mountain, maybe David Goldstein, maybe Sally Otto, Sarah Cohen, and a few others were going. And so I registered, got accepted to give a talk on the “Evolution of RecA” and made plane reservations to get to Montreal.

I arrived the night before my talk, found my dorm room on the McGill campus, and then went wandering around town for the Jazz Festival which was going on that night. After staying out pretty late, I got back to my room and had a bit of a panic attack when I looked at the schedule and found that the session in which I was talking started at 8:30 in the morning the next day and I did not have an alarm clock, nor was there one in my room. (I note, fortunately I was using real slides and could not spend the night modifying my talk in the way I do now with Keynote/PPT). Anyway – I pretty much knew I would sleep late without some work and so I made some notes with my room # and a plea to others to bang on my door if they could by 6:30 or 7 AM and I slipped these under the other doors in the hall. Fortunately in some ways, I barely slept b/c I was so scared of missing my first talk.

So at 6:30 AM or so I headed out to the conference area. I think I got some coffee and then headed to the room where my talk was to be. Nobody was even there so I wandered around for a bit and came back and the projectionist was there getting the room set up. When I said I was one of the speakers – he said “Are you planning on doing any side by side slides where you need two projectors?” Well, I had not thought of doing this, but now that he mentioned it, it sounded perfect b/c the main point of my talk was that the phylogenetic trees of RecA and rRNA were very similar to each other (see my 1995 J. Mol. Evol. paper on the topic here), supporting earlier suggestions by Lloyd and Sharp that RecA was a potentially useful phylogenetic marker. So I said “sure” and proceeded to load up two slide carousels for my talk. We checked them out and all looked good.

As the room started to fill up (I recall there were a lot of people interested in the “Molecular Evolution” session I was in) I decided to go grab a seat (in the far back on an aisle – I was a lurker even before blogging from meetings) and try to relax. I think I was the fourth talk and while speaker #3 (Michael Purugganan) was getting started I got nervous about the side by side slides so I went over to ask the projectionist if all was OK and he said it was. Alas, someone had grabbed my seat when I was up. I saw a table in the back back of the room with some misc. fliers on it so I went there to sit down for a few minutes and try to relax. And here was the trouble.

The table was also being used to hold some pitchers of water for people. And alas, someone had just spilled an entire pitcher of water on the table and I did not notice. I sat in the puddle. And there I was, in my tan shorts, now dripping wet. Minutes before my first talk. Looking like I had gotten a bit too nervous. Underwear showing through. As I desperately looked around to borrow a sweatshirt from someone to tie around my waist, the chair said “And our next speaker is Jonathan Eisen …”. Holy Crap. I was on.

So I went up there and I had thought to myself to crack a joke about just getting in from a swim. Or something. But as I still do, I entered another zone for my talk and forget everything but the talk. And so – there I was – dripping wet in my see through shorts – turning around and pointing to the screen talking about RecA as though all was fine.

Only when I was done with the talk did I re-remember that I was basically doing a “wet-shorts” contest for all in the audience. Yay. I can say truthfully that when I start to worry about things going wrong in talks, I remember this one and say “well, it could be worse …”

So distracting, in fact, that at one point I found myself being asked to comment on the current topic by the moderator. But I had no idea what the topic was, because I had been reading the chat room. In hindsight, the smart thing to do would have been to ask the moderator to restate the question. Instead, panicked, I looked up and out at the large audience full of highly intelligent and influential people, and said the first thing that popped into my head.

“I like cheese.”

And that’s when I learned that it apparently doesn’t really matter what you say on stage. The moderator moved on and nobody ever mentioned it. Well, as far as I know, for I never looked at the chat room after that.

It was 2000, at the height of the dotcom boom. I was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at a wireless industry conference, in front of 350 people. It was an important speech, at an important venue, and I spent a great deal of time custom-creating a gorgeous Powerpoint presentation the correct way: all simple graphics, virtually no text, designed to support the speaker, not detract the audiences attention from me. I was raring to go, and flew cross-country to the event ready to take the audience by storm.

Three hours before my morning keynote, I awake in the hotel to find…I had lost my voice. Completely. Laryngitis!

It was too late for the organizers to get anyone to fill in, they couldn’t cancel the keynote, and no one else could deliver my presentation because I speak extemporaneously and didn’t have a written text. Other than jumping out the window and watch my public speaking career go down the tubes, there didn’t seem to be a lot of alternatives. But then I had a brainstorm.

Taking my cue from old time silent movies, I jumped on my computer and quickly made up interstitial title slides for my presentation, using a nostalgic font and design with a bit of humor (“Meanwhile, back at the ranch…”). At the appointed time, I walked to the podium, and silently put up the first slide: “Hi Folks! I was all set for a great presentation this morning, but I’ve suddenly lost my voice…” I then proceeded to run through a 45 minute keynote, alternating between my original graphics and the new title slides, with an occasional whispered comment into the microphone held a few inches from my lips.

The result was fascinating. The audience was both sympathetic and amused, worked with me on getting through the presentation, and even leaned forward to hear my whispered comments. Far from being the disaster I thought it was going to be, it turned out to be the best speech I had yet given…and certainly the most unusual!

-David S. Rose, The Pitch Coach

Thirty seconds into my talk, the doors burst open and six balaklava-hooded and heavily armed OMON troops moved into the room. They did not speak. Neither did I.

Four of them occupied the corners of the room while two headed directly for a table on the far side, AK-47s drawn. They grabbed a man at table, stood him up, and marched him out of the dining room. All quiet, the remaining four sidled out.

I finished my talk. The Tokyo executives never returned to Moscow.

The second group of presenters, the designers behind the Roomba, began showing their design process. They even mentioned they had a cute video at the end of their presentation showing the little robot doing its thing. During the presentation I stepped out to pay the pizza guy. I also ran into some other designers and started chatting.

Then I panicked.

I didn’t know how much time had passed while I was talking, 1 minute, 20 minutes, no idea! I rushed back into the room, to this day I have no idea what came over me, but I came back into the room, sort of yelled: “on to the next presentation” and pulled the VGA cable right out of their laptop.

As I went to pull it out a friend in the front row whisper-yelled: “Sam, no!!!!” But it was too late. I pulled the cable right before the big crescendo of a video they had planned from the beginning. The climax of their presentation ruined. Oops.

He comes hurriedly into the room carrying a bunch of hardcopies of his slides, a laptop, and a thumb-drive and proceeds to rush up to the podium where the announcer was standing. I turned to my co-presenter and said “this can’t end well”…

There was the expected shuffling around, the surprise/agony look on the announcer’s face as he waves an audio/visual/computer guy to the scene to make a last minute slide swap, etc. All very excruciating for an audience already slipping into a post-lunch coma…

After several minutes, the computer guy, the announcer and the disheveled speaker (did I mention his shirt was a mess and he looked like he just stepped off a red-eye flight?) all beamed with pride as their last minute mission was accomplished. New slides in the podium computer, and it “only” made them about ten minutes late…

The announcer starts by reading the intro of the talk and the bio of the presenter. My co-presenter and I lost track of how many times the word “expert” was used. I thought, “wow we are in the presence of a genius, I’m glad we are going to learn something”.

The talk starts, and on the very first content slide he stumbles and has to look at his “notes” (apparently he was startled by his own slide), and in the process starts leafing through his (multiple?) copies of the presentation… in front of the audience… mumbling to himself… and then complaining that his notes section (I guess one of his hardcopies was in “notes” form) didn’t match, and started using phrases like “I think that’s what this means”… My skin was crawling. I felt bad for him, but also felt that he got what he deserved.

My philosophy in presenting is: Make sure you can do the whole presentation — without the presentation. You are telling a story, not reciting bullet points.

Sheesh!