Every father smiles when his little tyke beseeches him at bedtime,
“Daddy, Daddy, tell me the story again of the three little pigs” (or
the dancing princesses or how you and Mommy met). Daddy
knows Junior enjoyed the story so much the first time, he wants
to hear it again and again.
Junior inspires the following technique called “Encore!” which
serves two purposes. Encore! makes a colleague feel like a hap-
py dad, and it’s a great way to give dying conversation a heart
transplant.
I once worked on a ship that had Italian officers and mostly
American passengers. Each week, the deck officers were required
to attend the captain’s cocktail party. After the captain’s address
in
charmingly broken English, the officers
invariably clumped
together yakking it up in Italian. Needless to say, most of the pas-
sengers’ grasp of Italian ended at macaroni, spaghetti, salami, and
pizza.
As cruise director, it fell on my shoulders to get the officers to
mingle with the passengers. My not-so-subtle tactic was to grab
one of the officers’ arms and literally drag him over to a smiling
throng of expectant passengers. I would then introduce the offi-
cer and pray that either the cat would release his tongue, or a pas-
82
How to Get ’Em Happily
Chatting (So You Can Slip
Away if You Want To!)
✰
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Copyright 2003 by Leil Lowndes. Click Here for Terms of Use.
How to Get ’Em Happily Chatting (So You Can Slip Away if You Want To!)
83
senger would come up with a more original question than “Gee,
if all you officers are here, who is driving the boat?” Never hap-
pened. I dreaded the weekly captain’s cocktail party.
One night,
sleeping in my cabin,
I was awakened by the ship
rocking violently from side to side. I listened and the engines were
off. A bad sign. I grabbed my robe and raced up to the deck.
Through the dense fog, I could barely discern another ship not
half a mile from us. Five or six officers were grasping the starboard
guardrail and leaning overboard. I rushed
over just in time to see
a man in the moonlight with a bandage over one eye struggling
up our violently rocking ladder. The officers immediately whisked
him off to our ship’s hospital. The engines started again and we
were on our way.
The next morning I got the full story. A laborer on the other
ship, a freighter, had been drilling a hole in an engine cylinder.
While he was working, a sharp, needle-thin piece of metal shot
like a missile into his right eye. The freighter had no doctor on
board so the ship broadcast an emergency signal.
International sea laws dictate that any ship hearing a distress
signal must respond. Our ship came to the rescue and the seaman,
clutching his bleeding eye, was lowered into a lifeboat that brought
him to our ship. Dr. Rossi, our ship’s doctor, was successfully able
to remove the needle from the workman’s eye,
thus saving his
eyesight.
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