So, what DID you do?

[susandennis]

I get this question a lot. When people find out I'm retired, their next question is, So what did you did before you retired? I had two different careers. The last one was web production. The tools were nearly any kind of computer with internet access.

A lot of the first part of my career was writing speeches for IBM executives. This is still a fairly viable career but not like it was.   And the tools are totally different.

In the olden days...  The speech had to be written, re-written, edited, tweaked and polished with enough time to get it printed out - on actual paper, and into the speech box in time for the executive (who am I kidding... the Guy) to practice or, worst case, give the speech live with no rehersal.

I still have one of my old speech boxes.



And, hilariously, it has the 'user manual' inside.



I spent 5 of my speech writing years working for one guy. He loved his speech box.  He was a pretty good speaker and, generally, stuck to my script (so his speeches were always Great!).  He'd be all distracted and doing a million things until I put that box in his hands and then like a light switch being flipped, he'd be laser focused and ready to go. For big speeches sometimes we used a teleprompter but he used his speechbox, too.  If he needed visuals, we usually used an overhead projector and transparencies which we called 'foils'. Those, too, had to be created, edited tweaked and finalized ahead of time.

Today, I imagine speech writers who are working on computers with no paper, no foils and changing shit seconds before the welcome applause stops.  Honestly, I'm glad I got out of the biz before then.

Comments

[mrdreamjeans.livejournal.com]

I've always loved the idea of being a scriptwriter and am excited that I know someone who was ....

[susandennis]

Oh I was not a script writer. No clue how to write a script, Honest. That takes way more/different talent than I have.

Speeches are a different animal.

But, having said that... I see where I think you got the idea... The box is called a Script-Master as in manuscript. I'm thinking you mean dialogue script - like TV, movie, etc.

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a really interesting job!

[susandennis]

It really actually was. I got to go to great, fun places and meet interesting people and learn all kinds of cool things. One of the funnest features was that in order to have my executive speak intelligently and, yet, plainly about complex subjects, I got free reign to go around to all the developers and engineers and grill'em for info. I learned a whole lot (not the least of which is that most developers and engineers are really cool people!).

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

Well, as an engineer myself I won't argue with you...

I've never worked anyplace that had people to write speeches. Or, not at the level where I was anyhow.
I certainly know some folks who could have used them. I worked for one company where we went out of business because the president of the company said something he shouldn't have in a speech at a trade show.
Wish we had someone to stop that...

[susandennis]

Yikes and yuck. It does, by the way, take a very special and smart executive to be one who realizes having a professional help you write speeches is a valuable thing. Most of the executives I know today are way too cool to think they could use assistance (and all pretty much need it!).

[andrewducker]

That sounds like a fascinating job. Always something new to do, I'd have thought.

I wrote my own scripts for the talks I've done - and practiced the hell out of the last one I did, because I was nervous about being up in front of hundreds of people.

It frustrates me a lot when I see things go out where nobody has polished them - where the language is pedestrian, and doesn't _sing_ in the way it needs to in order to really grab people.

[susandennis]

If I had a nickel for everytime I muttered 'fire the speechwriter' under my breath listening to a bungled presentation...

[gfrancie.livejournal.com]

How did you get into being a speech writer?

[susandennis]

I kind of fell into it. I majored in journalism and when I got serious about making money, I went to IBM in their communications department. I wrote bulletin board notices for the plant I worked in, Tres glamorous.

I loved all the gadgets and gizmos and in my spare time, taught myself how to make the giant printer bend to my will. Speeches, on paper, work best if they come out in one single column - a third of the width of the page. I figured out how to make the giant printer print that way from any monitor in the joint. (Seems very mundane now but was seriously geeky in the early 80's.)

My boss wrote a speech for the general manager and I printed it out for him from his mainframe monitor. He thought I was a genius. He told the general manager what I had done. When he went on vacation, the general manager called me in to write some comments for his employee meeting and he loved them... and he made me the chief speech writer. I really loved it.

There weren't too many of us at IBM US in those days so we kind of all got traded around various places to various executives. It was the coolest.

[gfrancie.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting. I love asking people how they get into various lines of work, because most of the time it is a bit of chance and luck.

I think in some lines of work, there isn't quite the culture for allowing people to noodle around like that and figure out how something might work.

[susandennis]

The biggest trick in my career pocket has always been timing. At IBM, those printers were cutting edge but the focus was on customers. We were lucky to get one. No way could we get training so they were thrilled to have someone willing to figure it out.

The month I left IBM (I had a new job then and they moved it o Arizona - nooooo thank you), I picked up a magazine called Internet World and there was an article about a guy and his 10 year old son who built a web page over the weekend. Heck, if they could do it... So I figured it out. This was way before IE was born. Netscape was the only browser and it was very limited. So making web pages turned out to be a dirt simple task that everyone thought was druid magic. New career was born.