Page 26 - April 2020

FIELD NOTES
What the Mammals Learned
Some life events shove us out of our comfort
zones and head first into change . . . like when a
meteor killed all the dinosaurs and pushed puny
little mammals to the top of the food chain. This
current pandemic is just such an event (“Well,
I’m stuck at home. Guess I’d better figure out
video conferencing if I ever want to see anyone
other than myself in the mirror.”)
Let’s use a handy metaphor—dinosaurs and
mammals. So . . . a long time ago (in a time of
fairy tales . . . or millions of years before that)
mammals caught a break and got a leg up on the
dinosaurs. See, there was this global extinction
level event that pummeled those poor thunder
lizards into cold-blooded pate. The mammals,
being agile and warm-blooded, managed to
survive the nuclear winter when billions upon
billions of metric tons of airborne sun-blocking
dust arrived. When the dinosaurs got wind of
the impending change, they put on their ruby
slippers, clicked their scaled heels together, and
mumbled, “there’s no place like home, there’s
no place like home . . . ” over and over again. It
26 ONE COMMUNITY
Or how to evaluate someone on Zoom
James Wantz, DTM
didn’t do any good—their Toastmasters club no
longer met in person.
Many years later, those pesky and adaptable
mammals developed the wheel, sliced bread, and
the Internet (video conferencing soon followed—
and cat videos). They also revived the concept of
a Toastmasters meeting: where other mammals,
who wanted to be better at communicating, could
come together and talk (granted, the dinosaurs
first invented Toastmasters, but mammals were
never tolerated in their clubs—dinosaurs can be
so cold-blooded).
Jump to the present day, you are tooling along
about your everyday life earlier this year (yeah,
remember the good times?). You were attending
club meetings, giving excellent speeches, and
sharing phenomenal feedback with each
other. Life was good!
Then another meteor hit . . .
figuratively.
Now we are all stuck at home