Friday, December 5, 2008

are you there bob? it's me, webinar

My parents would have loved webinars.

As a child, one of the more geometric punishments my parents practiced involved me moving to a corner of a room. I'd face the corner, back to the room, and wait, marveling over the ninety-degree quality of the converging walls.

Every year meant one more minute of solitude in the corner. But every minute added gave me time to talk. I'd talk to people. People I could not see. People that I knew didn't really exist.

There was Bob, a rotund young man who had a penchant for praline's and cream. Bob would bring Barb, because Bob knew that with my speech impediment, names with bilabial sounds increased the precision of my speech.

Thandy and Theven refused to show up. They could never tolerate my thlurred S's.

Today, I sat in a corner. I spoke to the invisible. I spoke to them about presentations, rhetorical devices, slide design, and copyright-friendly images.



Bob was there. He was with me the entire thirty-seven minutes. He listened patiently. He never said a word. And just like thirty years ago, I have no idea if anything I said, anything I showed him, made any impact.

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