Meetings

René closed a strange meeting of Rhetorikclub Mannheim and Mannheim International Toastmasters, which had lasted far too long. In fact, there hadn’t been a single contribution that an award would have been worth it — the election of the best speeches had to be cancelled. René had taken over from JP who was general evaluator. In his opinion, the evaluations could had been shorter than 5-7 minutes. His comments were striking – a lot of criticism and little praise for the other roles such as timekeeper of the evening, thought of the day or Toastmasters of the evening.

MartinS tried to find at least one positive aspect of the speech of his namesake. After all, with „Cycling in the City“ MartinE had found an issue, that some people are rather hazy about. The evaluation for Harald by Gaetano was not that positive. He complained that Harald blinked constantly, occasionally said “Amen to that” and did not even know the names of important politicians. Fortunately the break before that had provided a bit of entertainment.

It felt like it was for 75th time when MartinE spoke and he was far from a smashing performance. Not only that he started with the very end of the speech. He even screwed up the boring joke with the Porsche driver and cyclist. For half a minute he didn’t have any idea what to say and everyone could enjoy the silence. Earlier Harald raised our hopes for an interesting speech at least briefly with “The political opposition from 1949 to the Present”. But soon he was unable to cope with this demanding topic. Then he did what he really is good at – drinking schnaps. At least he offered a drink to every Toastmaster too.

All this followed on from the impromptu speeches, boring as ever presented by Peter. Whether “If that’s the answer, I wanna have back my problem!”, “I do not have flaws, they are all special effects.” Or “No alcohol isn’t a solution either“.” – Once again all these issues demonstrated how primitive the Toastmasters evenings in Mannheim have become now.

Of course no one understood the thougt of the day. Nobody understood the the thought of the day. If I remember correctly, René had come up with something bad about women, claiming the saying was from Clint Eastwood. Rene had presented a quote about women, allegedly said by Clint Eastwood – a likely story! Without a punching line at all was JPs dirty joke. The anecdote about a priest hearing a young lady’s confession still makes me blush with shame. So René – being the President of Mannheim Int. Toastmasters and Toastmaster of the evening – was able to welcome the disinterested members and guests and opened the meeting.