COLUMN: Death by Speaker

By Tobin Barnes
    “Stop! You’re killing me here!”
    Have you ever wanted to get up, in the middle of everybody--you know, you’re at a meeting or presentation or workshop or something, and heck, you’ve got to attend this darned thing--there’s no choice--but you’d dearly love to get up in front of this whole organized confabulation and say exactly those words?
    Yeah, I have, too. Many’s the time. Everybody belongs to this club.
    The speaker is so mind-numbingly dull or the subject matter is so dessicatingly dry or your interest level is so minimal or a combination of all the above that you would scream if every civilized bone in your body weren’t telling you that you just can’t do that sort of thing.
    Yes, you’ve got to sit there and take it. Suffer, you poor bastard.
    One of my favorite cartoons has Dilbert giving a slide presentation and his audience is either asleep or suffering suicidal mental anguish brought on by boredom. One woman says, “You’ve stolen an hour of my life. Something inside me died. I will never have another good day.”
    In the final panel a disheartened and defeated Dilbert says to Wally, “I went in with low expectations.”  And Wally says, “They can’t hurt you if you’re already dead.”
    In these captive/torture situations where I am the tortured, there’s admittedly a little Stockholm Syndrome going on. I always suffer a certain amount of sympathy for my torturer. Uh huh, I feel for them.
    How can I sympathize with someone who is ripping my soul out of my body and replacing it with dust?
    Well, they, unwittingly, are victims as well.
    They, he or she, probably didn’t want to be doing the presentation themselves. They hate talking about this subject as much as we detest pretending to listen to it. Or, worse, they are so self-deluded they think they have the God-given talent to turn chicken crap into chicken salad. They think they’re so charming or incisive or funny that they can still win the crowd over despite the fact that they are talking about drain sludge.
    And so, for any or all of these reasons, I feel sorry for them.
    Nevertheless, despite this softy oozing sympathy, I still want to get up and violently yell, “Stop this travesty! Our lives are limited, and we can’t waste our precious time listening to this.”
    Oh yes, certainly such an outburst would be bold, brash, and, of course, outlandishly rude, but in a larger sense, it would be a service to humanity to put a quietus not only to this current presentation, but maybe also to all such presentations wherever human beings are subjected to them. That’s right, maybe my abrupt, totally unexpected actions in that workshop or whatever would light a fire, and begin a trend that would spread to somnolent presentations all over the world.
    So inspired, here, there, and everywhere, tortured, brain-schmoozed listeners would rise up, yell out, and put a stop to relentless, boring presenters and mental fatigue would generally subside under a general outlook that “Yes, there is a possibility of a fresh, new morning without the all-encompassing shadow of a lethal dumb-foundedness.”
    Of course, this all being said, I would like to caution some restraint when it comes to my own presentations as an English and U.S. history teacher. At times like these, I strongly feel that student boredom comes mostly from within and much less often from without, as when I’m enthrallingly relating the interesting details of the Wilmot Proviso in the pre-Civil War slavery agitation.