Based on actual events.  Don’t try these on your audiences.  Please feel free to nominate the worst cases of audience abuse you have witnessed. 

10.  The speaker who comes out on stage and says, “Good Morning. . . . GOOD MORNING!. . . .  I can’t hear you!. . . . GOOD MORNING!!!!. . . . Until the audience responds with a sufficiently loud form of that banal salutation to satisfy the speaker. 

9.  The speaker who buries his head in a text, reading behind the podium, never once looking up to connect with the audience, for 10….30…..60 minutes. 

8.  The speaker who presents a dense slide of data to the audience, saying, “You can’t read this, but what this slide shows is…..”

7.  The speaker who begins her talk with, “But first, let me tell you a little bit about me, my company, and how we got to this point….”

6.  The (male) speaker who spends the entire 60 minutes talking to the attractive woman in the third row.  (Or vice-versa.) 

5.  The speaker who talks down to the audience, saying, “You don’t need to understand this; suffice it to say that….”

4.  The speaker who is so fascinated with his subject, say, the low-light hydroculture of Paeonia lactiflora, that he tells the audience everything he knows about it, believing that the audience is just as interested. 

3.  The speaker who begins her talk saying “I have 235 slides and only 30 minutes, so I’m going to move very fast.  But don’t worry, I’m e-mailing the deck to everyone at the conference.”

2.  The speaker who presents the results of the multi-year study….in total, on several hundred illegible slides, including the assumptions and statistical models used to analyze the data – and insists on going over every single slide. 

1.  The speaker who runs 20 minutes over time.