A Talk Goes Wrong

Hettie Vance had prepared forty-two slides for a talk of twenty minutes, which anybody with more experience would have recognised as the first thing to go wrong. The subject was the naming of streets, on which she could speak for four hours, and had, at parties, to her cost.

The conference was a small one, held in a university building with a lift that had been out of order long enough for the sign to fade. There were sixty people, most of them holding a lanyard in one hand and a coffee in the other, and one of them was the person she had come to impress.

She was on after the plenary and before lunch, a position the chairperson described as excellent and which is in fact the worst on any programme, since the audience has stopped concentrating and has not yet been fed.

The first eight minutes were fine. Then she pressed the clicker, and slide nine was not slide nine. Slide nine was a photograph of eleven men in matching shirts standing beside an enormous cheese, above the words OUR REGIONAL TRADITIONS: A CELEBRATION.

What had happened, as she worked out afterwards, was that the technician had loaded two files into the same folder and that her presentation had been overwritten in the queue by the one due at three. The auditorium found this funnier than she did, though not by much.

She said, into the microphone, that she would go back a slide, and pressed the clicker twice. This produced the twelfth photograph of the cheese sequence, which was taken at a lower angle and included a mayor. Somebody at the back applauded, and Hettie chose to take it as encouragement.

At this point she reached for her printed text, which she had left, along with her water, on a chair in the corridor. She had a clear picture of the chair. There is a particular kind of calm that arrives when a situation has finished unravelling and can be surveyed as a whole.

So she stepped out from behind the lectern, asked the technician to turn the projector off altogether, and said that she would do the rest from memory. The chairperson made a small grimace which Hettie interpreted, correctly, as a warning about the allotted time.

To extemporise for eleven minutes about street names is, it turns out, easier than reading forty-two slides about them. She told them about a road named twice, about a committee that had spent nine months on a cul-de-sac with four houses, and about a village where a spelling mistake became official in 1931 and has been defended ever since.

Nobody looked at a phone. She was not flustered any more, which she noticed with some suspicion, in the way one notices that a headache has gone. The microphone produced one burst of feedback, and she waited it out deadpan, remarking that the building disagreed.

She was ninety seconds from the end when the fire alarm went off. It was a test, announced on a notice by the lift which nobody uses because the lift is broken. Six hundred people left three buildings and stood in a car park in a light and pointless rain.

Mercifully, the alarm did not stop the questions. They followed her out. She answered four of them beside a hedge, and a fifth on the way back in, and she did not overrun, because there was no longer anything to overrun.

The person she had come to impress found her at lunch and said that it was the only talk of the morning she could still remember, which is a compliment with a hole in the middle, and Hettie took it anyway.

She has given the same talk four times since, always without slides. She still writes them, forty-two of them, and puts the file on a stick, and leaves the stick in her bag, where it functions less as a presentation than as a charm against the thing it is there to prevent.