An anaesthetised and semi-toothless JP introduced the evening, after making it through an earlier committee-pizza-dinner-come-meeting on the back of his surgery today! But there was plenty to celebrate tonight; our guest Maggie, the return of our Marise, Malcom joining the club and Dave B’s birthday! JP handed over the reins to our Toastmaster Ellie with a promise to head home soon!
Our first speaker was the birthday-boy himself with “The stand-up workspace”, a speech from the ‘Speeches by management’ manual. Charged with the task of motivating people to take action, Dave made some strong arguments for leaving the traditional office chair behind and ‘going stand-up’! “Just try it” urged Dave, “For $50 and two hours of setup you’ll be up and standing your way to better health”. A thoroughly convincing speech – congratulations Dave!
The evening’s second speech came from our other Dave who is studying the “Technical Presentations” advanced manual. “The Concorde Report” was a technical presentation based around the infamous AF4590 flight which on July 25, 2000 crashed soon after take-off killing all 109 passengers and crew. Beginning by questioning the audience on their recollection of the cause, Dave totally dismantled our widespread understanding of the events as he shared in his own words, the results of the crash investigation. With tremendous use of examples and AV equipment, Dave built this speech up to the key phrase “Was this an act of God? Men, not God caused the Concorde to crash”. Congratulations Dave Y!
Janet was our Tabletopics Master, challenging us to talk about our childhood dream job, then our actual job.
Emma was first with childhood ambitions of becoming a potato chip inspector, motivated to seek out every burnt chip in existence, eventually winding up as a submarine chef, specialising in the rehydration of freeze-dried food! Marg dreamed of being a bounty hunter as a child, as some kind of retaliation against dishonesty. We weren’t sure what happened to Marg, because this bounty-hunter-wannabe somehow wound up to be a professional sleeper. Really?! Marise loved her toys when she was young, and out of spite for her brothers always wanted to be a Lego sculptor. But those dreams fell apart after her siblings melted all her lego in the microwave, causing Marise to combine her love of water and golf, becoming a golf-ball diver. Eh?! Malcom’s mum was a shark specialist, always constantly working down at the aquarium, which prompted Malcom to aspire to being a shark tank cleaner. Seemingly all this time is swimming togs eventually lead to Malcom pursuing a career as a men’s underwear designer.
As our timer David said in his report, ‘From burning planes to burnt chips, we’ve had it all’! Another great meeting – congratulations to all who took part!