Let us be clear; I really enjoy public speaking. I used to be in a debating team and while I enjoyed it, I must confess that the necessity of being able to argue both sides of a position left me feeling too much like a politician. I prefer to argue things that I can believe in passionately, to make presentations which educate and enlighten. As was once said of the fictional President Josiah Bartlett,
"A podium is a holy place for him. He makes it his own like it's an extension of his body. You ever see a pitcher work the mound so the dirt does exactly what his feet want it to do? That's the President. He sees it as a genuine opportunity to change minds"

Okay, maybe I don't go that far, but in training people, in teaching them how to do their work more efficiently and better I hope to make a difference to their lives by making them more efficient and helping them to get home earlier so that they can spend more time on this earth doing the things that matter to them and not just the things that they have to do to pay the mortgage.

Sometimes I do this in videos, but oftentimes I do it in front of real people and I try to make an apparent connection with every person in the room. So I had no trepidation whatsoever when I was invited to do a session at a user conference.

Here is my podium all prepared for my session. The eagle eyed might even notice my trusty notepad computer Beast Light sitting up there on the lectern ready to be plugged in to the AV system, my presentation of wisdom about to be projected on half a dozen huge screens scattered around me.

And I completely, and utterly, screwed it up. I completely underestimated the amount of time to do the presentation, as a result of which I ran out of time long before I finished. It was to date the single worst public display I have done. And I should've realised. When I do training courses I allow myself a couple of hours. On this occasion I had 40 minutes, and while I had timed the presentation of individual components of the talk, I didn't time them together. And the whole, as it turned out, was greater than the sum of the parts.

So has this put me off public presentations? No, but if I'm doing them on someone else's turf in future I'm going to be a lot more careful about doing a full rehearsal. In the meantime, I put this up as a reminder to myself of just how bad a public presentation can get. And admittedly I did feel rather guilty when I found out that people had come from Adelaide and Melbourne to this conference specifically to see me. No pressure.

(Mind you, the attendees weren't shortchanged; after this was finished I put up a document which contained a full outline of the subject that I was talking about. It ran to 198 pages.)

I probably should have known that the omens were bad since I took about half a dozen shots of the podium before the speech, and this was the only one which is halfway decent.