Speech #15, Innocense

[This Toastmasters project is called "Make Them Laugh".  I was required to come up with some personal experiences and make them humorous.  I had a bit of trouble thinking of things.  The result was this speech.  The audience was polite, but in all honesty, I bombed.  Oh well, everyone has to strike out sometimes.]

In our culture, we expect children to be innocent.  By the same token, we expect adults to be the opposite.  I don’t mean guilty.  I mean innocent as in lack of guile.  When adults are truly innocent, the results can be funny.---

In the 70s, my business was building simulators.  I’m sure you have all seen videos of flight simulators used to train pilots to fly.   Well, my simulators duplicated  control rooms trained nuclear power plant operators.  My simulators were huge, about the size of a basketball court.

In 77, I was helping a company in Finland to make their first simulator.  Because Finns have a fine eye for art and aesthetics, their gymnasium size simulated control room was not just functional, it was strikingly beautiful.

The project manager was a delightful handsome young man named Martti.  Martti was very innocent.  That year was the international conference on simulators to be held (in all places) Gatlinburg, Tennessee.   I went there with the team of Finns including Martti. For most of them it was their first trip to America.S Martti brought with him a portfolio of pictures of his beautiful simulator.

One day at breakfast, Martti told us that after yesterday’s session he met a woman engineer from a major American utility.  The two of them hit it off and had a nice conversation.  Then Martti said, “I asked her to come up to my room to see my simulator pictures.  She refused.   I can’t understand why.”  The rest of us howled with laughter because we knew that Martti was completely innocent.

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At that same conference, I was presenting my own paper on simulators.  The darkened room held about 300 people in the audience.  There was no stage.  Midway through my talk, I noticed a man in the front row holding a sign. 

YOUR FLY IS OPEN.

Uh oh.  I backed away from the light of the overhead projector, and I did a little pirouette to quickly zip it.  But it wasn’t open, it was broken and it wouldn’t zip.

What to do next?   Well, I noticed that because there was no stage, nobody behind the front row could see me below the waist,  So I pretended that nothing was wrong and finished my speech.

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A few years before that, I went to work for a big company in Sweden.  My knowledge of Swedish was very elementary at the time, but most Swedes speak excellent English.  On my first day on the job, I was sent to the company infirmary for a physical.  The nurse at the infirmary didn’t speak English, but she managed to convey that I should take off my clothes.  Swedes are less modest than Americans.  As I stood there naked, she grabbed a clipboard and sat on a stool directly in front of me, and said (in Swedish)  “How long are you?”  The only reply I could manage was hamana hamana hamana. My boss explained to me later that the Swedish word long should be translated as tall.

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Back to Martii once again.  After the Gatlingburg trip, Martti invited the team with their wives to a dinner at a fancy restaurant on an island in Helsinki.  At the dinner table,  Martti eagerly showed us his most prized souvenir from the trip.  It was a digital watch.  That was the year that digital watches first appeared.  Martti’s watch was as thick as a thumb, and the digits glowed an evil red like the eyes of the Devil in a monster movie.  But Martti was sure that the was the first person in all of Finland to own such a watch, perhaps in all of Europe.

“Where did you get it?” we asked.  Martii said, “I went to New York City on my way back.  A man came up to me and opened his coat.  He had lots of watches and he sold me this one for only two dollars.”  Martti held up his wrist and pointed proudly.  But when he did that the works fell out of his watch and dropped into his soup. 

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So here’s the point.  In all of those stories, the humor comes from someone being truly innocent in an otherwise adult situation.  Long live innocence.