The Icebreaker

Speaking Index

Delivered 24 April 2007

The first speech a new member gives in Toastmasters is the Icebreaker, an introduction of the new member to the club. This is Project 1 in the Communication and Leadershop Program manual.

My name is Van Van Horn, and I'm here to break some ice. The real question is whether or not I can do it synchronously.

There was a time when I could stand up in front of a group with a few notes on index cards and just make my pitch. But that, I fear, was long ago. Almost everything I've had to say in the last thirty years has been asynchronous.

I grew up at Port Angeles, fifty miles or so west of here. It's a good place to be from. Like most of my high school class, I left not long after graduation.

Before I bailed out, I did get my first real job, working at the local radio station. At KONP I started by arranging live news coverage from the local party conventions in 1971. They let me hang out back stage and file a few live reports, as long as I did all the legwork and hustled a few sponsors to pay for it. I had so much fun doing it that I was soon a fulltime member of the sales staff. Selling radio in a small town is no small job. Taking what notes I had from the advertiser, I wrote the ad copy, picked background music or sound effects, and headed into a recording booth to actually create the ads. I was in the communications business, and loving it.

At the same time, I tried to continue my education. I'd been so burned out in high school that it's a wonder I graduated, but I signed up for a few classes at Peninsula College. I thought getting the AA-degree would be easy enough, but work was more fun. I started three quarters, only finished once.

But I was a communicator, by God, so I signed up for English Comp and aced it, and I signed up for Speech 101 and passed. I'm still angry about that. The teacher said our grades would be based 80% on our oral work, 10% on the written work, and 10% on attendance. Piece of cake! I've never been good at homework. But I figured that if I showed up for class and did a good job on the speeches, I had a solid B, maybe an A-minus. Ballistic would be a good description of my response to getting a C. Despite my threatening him with a dictionary, the teacher insisted that the written notes for a speech were part of the oral work, and I had never turned any in.

It didn't change my attitude about speaking, but it ratified by attitude toward school.

I joined the local Toastmasters club. Tonight, Ginny Nelson is the ah-counter. Considering my proclivity for "uh" and "ah" and "yuh know", not to mention a few other nasty habits, she's doubtless making lots of little hashmarks on her pad right now. That seems incredibly civilized. In my first Toastmasters club, there were no hashmarks. They had a three-pound coffee can and a bag of marbles. Do you have any idea how loud the first marble that hits the bottom of an empty coffee can is?

But I'd had enough of the small town, and in some ways the small town had had enough of me. I moved to Seattle, and discovered that radio sales in a major market is a whole different ballgame, and one that I wasn't suited for. I decided to try my hand at screen printing, and spent almost twenty years doing most of my communicating with stencils and squeegees.

I started with the easy stuff, bumper stickers, real estate signs, a half a million t-shirts. But there were a lot of tricky jobs out there, and they appealed to me. It isn't easy printing five colors of epoxy followed by a perfect dust-free urethane clear on the aluminum skin that becomes the top of a water ski, but my shop did tens of thousands of them. Boat dashboards seemed like a good market, we knew how to make them and we knew who needed them. What I didn't know was how to survive when half the customers filed bankruptcy and the other half just didn't buy anything for three months, so there were some rocky years.

My communications branched out at the end of that period, I became the computer columnist for the largest magazine in my industry. In fact, I actually ended up doing a little speaking again. I flew to Ohio at least once a year for a while, speaking to groups of printers at Dayton or Cincinnati.

Being a magazine columnist is harder than it looks. You don't actually have to put clothes on to go to work, but you do have to come up with something new to say every month, because you have the same readers every month. After five years, I simply ran out of things to say, and the columns started to show it. My readers were happy, my editors were happy, but I wasn't satisfied I was doing a good job anymore, so I bowed out. When my face wasn't in the magazine every month, those speaking gigs in Ohio went too.

By then I was writing for several computer magazines, doing reviews and we had moved to Whidbey. I'd often come home in the afternoon to find a stack of boxes on the porch, small ones with software, big ones with computers and printers. I'd end up with an impromptu network of six computers, or a string of six printers stretching out into the living room. Storing the boxes became a chore, and I got used to the computers changing constantly. Life was good. I was writing for Byte, Windows Magazine, InfoWorld Direct, MacWeek, and a handful of others. But the time came when life wasn't good for magazines, their budget for freelancers shrank, and one-by-one, just about all of them went out of business. At least none of them went bankrupt while owing me fifty grand, like one boat manufacturer had done ten years before.

Two things kept me going at that point. One was keeping computers working for local businesses. I hesitate to say what I really feel about this, because it's how I've earned most of my income for the last fifteen years, but network maintenance is not communications. After you've spoken to hundreds and written for hundreds of thousands, reinstalling someone's printer driver for the fifteenth time just doesn't have any kick. The same low boredom threshold that keeps me from doing well in school means I have to have work with at least some challenge, which brings me to the other thing that kept me alive after the magazines died, the internet.

Before the internet was open to normal folks, I'd been online for ages. As early as the mid-eighties I'd publicly said that the most important use of computers would be for communications. My first modem ran at 300 bits-per-second. I remember paying over six hundred bucks for a 9600 bit-per-second modem, and that was half off the regular price. In the mid nineties, when internet access became a possibility here on Whidbey, modems were three to five times that fast, and selling for fifty bucks. I was ready.

I signed up with Whidbey Telephone's new internet operation, I was customer number one. That was 1995 and I was creating web pages when the common browsers were Cello and Mosaic, and Netscape had just come on the scene. In 1998 I created a website called Digital Eyes, all about digital cameras and scanners. In other words, I created a communications vehicle to communicate about communications tools.

I also started my first mailing list, called Twisted Straw. It wasn't much, just a list of addresses and every day I dug up two or three jokes and mailed them to the list. In the bizarre world of the Dot Com Boom, I sold the name and the list for over twenty thousand dollars.

In a very real way, to whatever extent cyberspace is actually a place, I live and work on the internet. It's an odd asynchronous life, the opposite of synchronous. Synchronous means "happening at the same time". Face to face conversations are synchronous, phone calls are synchronous, this speech at least has the appearance of being synchronous. I'm talking, you're hearing, at the same time. But most of what I've done for the last two decades has been asynchronous.

When I was reviewing hardware, I would talk to the PR flaks for the product, chat up a few editors, and get an assignment. A month later I'd get a box on the porch. A month later I'd file my story. A month after that I'd get a check. And maybe a month after that I'd see my words in the magazine.

On the web we figure out the contents of a page, the words and images. I arrange them, hopefully in a way that makes sense. Then I upload them to a server somewhere. Sometime, maybe within seconds, maybe three years later, somebody sees the page. And yes, I do get e-mails responding to things I wrote over ten years ago, expecting me to still have a clue!

Every night I pick a theme for the Quotes of the Day, my current active mailing list. I pick a half dozen quotes, from my database of about 25,000, assemble that as an e-mail, and send it out to 12,000 subscribers. Most days I get some sort of comment from five or ten readers. But the same issue pops up, writer and audience aren't sharing the moment. It's almost the last thing I do before bed, for most of the readers, it's the first e-mail they open when they get to work.

I've done a lot of communicating. I've written at least a hundred thousand words that have gone into print, more that have been available on the web, and even more that have gone out as e-mail. But other than a dozen sermons I've given at the Saturday evening service at Trinity Lutheran at Freeland, almost all of it has not only been asynchronous, but delivered over substantial distances.

And timing! I'm sure I’m already over my time, writers don't have to pay any attention to it at all.

Back in that speech class at Peninsula College thirty-five years ago, I was a cocky kid and got A's for speeches delivered from a few note cards. I'd think it over, makes a few notes, and wing it. After twenty years as a writer, I can't do that now. I wrote this, and edited it, and edited it again, just like I've written all my sermons. (Any chance we can get a teleprompter for the club?) Even reading a prepared text, I'll bet I've given Ginny something to do, although I hope memories of that coffee can have kept it down.

So here I am. An old fat guy, potbellied from sitting at the keyboard with the occasional bottle of good beer. In the words of an old song, "an over-fed, long-haired, leaping gnome", although the hair used to be longer and I don't leap as high as I once did. An old fat guy in search of synchronicity, hoping to learn, actually relearn, how to stand up and communicate in real time again.