Captive Audience
We used to have a VIP who’d come to the office every so often and give a very loooong talk. You couldn’t even call it a speech–speeches don’t last hours. You couldn’t even call it a lecture because I don’t recall two-hour classes consisting solely of the speaker talking the whole time (the longest classes I had were lab classes. I used to teach lab once and I had my students focus and their experiments rather than me talking beyond the routine experiment briefing I give during the first 30 minutes. The lecture classes that I had lasted 1.5 hours but then the teacher themselves would call for an intermission sometime in the period).
Now, to be fair, he doesn’t deliver his looooong talk in English but instead in Japanese and it’s not only him talking the whole time. So, every often he’d pause and his interpreter would chime in in English.
But still, given this, it’s still mind-boggling how he can just stand there and talk. For hours.
Let’s say the whole thing lasted three hours (and no, that’s not an exaggeration. He really can stand there for more than three hours) so given that the Japanese and English parts take half, he would have been speaking for more than an hour (But from what I understand from Nihonggo, Japanese sentences tend to be longer than their English counterparts. You do the math).
I don’t know about you but that’s not a speech. A Catholic mass lasts an hour but that includes songs and other people talking. Even the masses during Spanish colonial times, I think, don’t last that long (I think the friars would deliver their sermons for an hour or so and the rest of the mass would usually take 45 minutes to an hour). Even plays can’t last that long without having an intermission (and in plays, people take turns talking…or singing).
What’s worst is that this guy–and I really believe this–has absolutely no empathy. He claims that people paid attention to him and this even motivated to talk more. What tipped him off? People dozing off? People just chatting with their seatmates? The audience pointing at his slides laughing? Gee, if I were him, I think I’d take that as a clue that people are no longer interested in what I’m saying. And even if they were, I’d only talk for 30 minutes tops. He even said that he could go on forever. I think that if our management didn’t stop him, he really would have gone on forever.
