Smoke gets in your eyes.

A bit of fun. A tale that you might find amusing as it is near the end of the year and hey, we could all do with a laugh now and again. There is a lesson to learn too.

I tell this story with David Beckett’s permission because if you can’t laugh at yourself and at your mistakes, you learn nothing. David is a long time friend and all round good guy - he is a great pitch coach so get his book or sign up to his presentation courses - they are great and you learn a great deal. ( https://Best3minutes.com)

So let’s roll back the years.

I first came across David way back, when I employed him as part of my Marketing team at Canon Audio. He was twenty years old and as keen as mustard. This off - shoot company of the giant that is Canon Inc, was much in demand on the visiting dignitaries circuit, as we were one of the very first to design and manufacture products in Europe. And what’s more we made some great products - loudspeakers.

On this particular occasion - a European wide product launch - to be attended by the Japanese President of Canon no less. The pressure was on our team to put together a great and memorable presentation.

I set David the task of creating a fantastic showroom and creating a spectacular reveal of our new product range.

He did that for sure!

Now, I have to explain a bit of the geography of our office so you can appreciate what comes next.

We have a long corridor with a large meeting room down one end. You could see into this room as it had glass walls. Here we laid out all the chairs for the big wigs arriving from all over the world. From the corridor you could also see the door of the adjoining room where David had set up the display.

All the Presidents men would sit in the front row ( they were after all shorter than the rest and our guest of honour ) and in descending order of country of importance the chairs were laid to the back of the room. An audience if memory serves me correctly of about 30 people.

In between the large presentation room were sliding doors that revealed David’s showroom of the shiny new products. He had worked long and hard to make this room look great, flashing lights, music blasted out and it looked better that the local disco - hey it was a long time ago.

We rehearsed the presentations into the early evening the night before. The slides worked well and as the screen lifted our Sales Director, Glen, would slide open the doors with a flourish to reveal the new products with the disco show in full force.

All was well. We were very pleased with ourselves and confident of a great presentation to come.

As we sat there supping our well earned beers David piped up and said, “ You know it would look so much better if we had dry ice across the floor in the show room”. We laughed and said “where are you going to get a dry ice machine this time of night. David had a huge grin on his face and said I‘ve got one.”

Well, you have to give the young man his head and he set it up in the show room and fired it up and we all agreed that it did look great. 

So we all agreed David will get his dry ice.

On the day the dignitaries arrived and we all shook hands and bowed allot. I was positioned in the corridor so I could see Glen doing his presentation through the glass and when his last slide came up I would give David the signal to squirt his smoke machine.

The last slide came up. I gave David the thumbs up.

The music began to play and David hit the smoke button and his room filled with a layer of smoke. 

Then Glen in the big meeting room opened the sliding doors for the great reveal. 

Yeah you’ve guessed it!

On opening the sliding doors a vacuum was created and all the smoke gushed into the presentation room devouring the 30 attendees….on seeing his smoke just disappear David let rip and another wave of smoke filed the room.

The audience just disappeared in front of me and people were rapidly trying to get out of the room.

Our MD staggered out took one look at me and said - “where is the xxxx President?”

I raced inside to discover that the President and all his front row were still sitting patiently on their seats completely engulfed in smoke.

We managed to evacuate everyone from the room, open all the windows to clear the smoke.

Along with coughs and splutters apologies rained down like confetti. 

Thankfully and bless his cotton socks, the President, found it hilarious and we all burst into hysterical laughter. 

Our jobs were saved and we learnt the hard way to rehearse everything, even, ‘the bloody sliding doors.’