Before I appeared on a local morning TV show to promote some of the new Assistive Technology we have at Regina Public Library earlier this week, I jokingly posted on my Facebook and Twitter that people should tune in if they were fans of “awkward pauses and stammering answers”.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be true – at least at the start of this interview. When I first started talking, I was a bit unsteady as you’ll see in the clip below.
Why’d it go off the rails at the start? The guy interviewing me came in the Green Room beforehand and we briefly chatted about what we’d be talking about on air. I explained we had a bunch of new assistive technology at RPL – some in all branches, some in our largest branches only and some specialized equipment in the Outreach Unit.
But when I started talking on-air and said what, for me, is a pretty standard spiel about how “the Outreach Unit serves visually impaired and homebound patrons”, the interviewer seized on the word “homebound” and went down a rabbit hole about how people who were homebound could use this exciting new equipment we purchased if it was in our branches? (Luckily, I didn’t blurt my initial smart-ass answer – “if they’re homebound, they’re probably not going to be using this equipment in branches, chucklehead!”)
I had planned to talk about the in-branch equipment so this question threw me for a bit of a loop. I stammered about how we’d have screen reader software on the RPL web site (meaning we could have a link to where homebound patrons could download it though I fear it didn’t come across that way), almost started talking about e-books as another option for homebound patrons but quickly aborted that idea and luckily, I think I recovered fairly well, steering it back to the equipment we did have in the branches, got in a nice anecdote about how the equipment has already positively impacted on patron and even had a bit of fun “blowing the interview’s mind” around a common library misconception.
All in three minutes!
(Sorry for the sound is a bit low in this clip – I used the very advanced technique of “point iDevice at TV and record it”.)
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