Do you want to start out a meeting with “Let’s all introduce ourselves” at the beginning? I’m not a huge fan of this in general because it can get kind of out of control time wise (or very out of control), even with a small crowd, unless you’re careful.

Three little anecdotes about this follow. I’m not sure if there’s a common thread but they’re amusing in their own way.

1 — I’m reading Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of A Man Who Rescued A Million Yiddish Books, a really fun book about Aaron Lansky, an American Jewish guy, who fell in love with old Yiddish books and spends his life saving them.

In one of the early scenes when his organization is first getting started, Lansky calls together a meeting of those interested in helping him. The group is made up of young people, early-mid 20’s, “long-hairs”, and very old New York Jews. He starts the meeting by saying, “Let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves.”

I started laughing right away. Lansky says it was a big mistake in his next sentence. His audience liked talking so much that it took an hour and a half to get through the twelve of them! He had of course just meant for the name and a sentence or two.

(Incidentally I’m listening to audio tape of this and the narrator, George Guidall, is amazing. He does the old Yiddish man and woman accents so you can tell they’re Yiddish but without stereotyping. He can have multiple Yiddish old men conversing and sound distinct from one another and Yiddish at the same time. His pacing and volume control are also out of the park, too.)

2 — About a month ago my club was dead silent about five minutes before the meeting began. There were maybe twenty people sitting around the table dead quiet and it was kind of awkward. So one of the club members said we should say our name and how long we’ve been in Toastmasters. Toastmasters may not be as talkative as old Yiddish speakers, but most of us spent a lot longer than the few moments that “My name is Joe Schmo and I’ve been in Toastmasters three years.”

We started the meeting five minutes late in the end because the intros ran over and had to cut table topics way short thanks to long winded main speeches. Given there was only one guest and they wouldn’t have remembered half the names anyway, I’m not convinced going around and doing the intro at the beginning of a TM meeting is a good idea unless you’re very disciplined about it.

I do like guests getting to introduce themselves so they feel welcome, but this should be a much quicker job.

3 — The one time I saw the intros work really well was when I was on jury duty. We had to fill out a questionnaire with our name/occupation/age/interests and a few other disqualifying type questions. Then all forty potential jurors had to get up and say their name and occupation and then be quiet. The lawyers had our filled out questionnaires in their possession and would ask us maybe one or two questions about our hobbies to warm us up. Then they asked hypotheticals such as, “If the police came to your house would you let them in?”

We moved through all of this very quickly and without much incident, given how many of us there were and how much we had to cover.

I was tempted to get myself disqualified as a juror by saying something crazy. My dad, a lawyer, told me once that the magic formula was to say, “That bastard looks guilty to me.” I didn’t. Nor did anyone give their life story, tell why they joined Toastmasters, take half an hour explain their love of Yiddish books, or anything like that. And the reason was… there was that Judge fellow sitting above us who didn’t look like he wanted to hear it.