Speaking

While he had grown fairly comfortable as a public speaker over the years -- no more sweaty armpits, stammering mostly gone -- he still had a habit of talking too much, especially when he wasn't entirely confident of what he was speaking. When nervous, his subconscious would search his memory for any supporting detail, argument, or analogy that might possibly help. This would lead him at times to begin a statement and realize, half-way through, that this statement wasn't actually going to help at all, but would rather hurt his presentation. He had once given a presentation on a new software module for generating payroll, and boasted about how easy it was to use -- so easy, in fact, that "if you had someone working for you who probably shouldn't have been hired in the first place" -- at this point he knew he had made a major blunder, but there was no going back now, he couldn't leave the statement just hanging there, he had to find the most graceful way to complete this statement and move on -- "you can finally get some productivity out of them," at which point he realized the best possible scenario was that his audience would forget his entire presentation.