Bringing Faire (specifically Talk Like a Pirate Day) to the Business World

[Lady Kett]

First - mods, if you'd rather this was in mundane topics, feel free to move. I dithered back and forth where to post and ended up here.

Second, the point!

I am travelling, with 4 of my staff members, from Texas to Ohio on Sept 19th. Our purpose is to give some "cultural training" to a vendor of ours. This is a long term vendor, but we are moving which office services us, from the one in TX to the one in OH. So we get to go tell them about us. Our culture, our employees, our company etc. All that good normal boring business stuff. And I will send them my "official" (notice the quotes?) presentation beforehand so they can have it "ready" (haha) to share when we show up Monday. I will be giving the presentation to at least 2, possibly 3 groups of people. The entire presentation is about 2 to 2.5 hours long. And we're going to need some humor to lighten it up so people don't fall asleep. My poor staff, is quite used to me so they should not be phased by this.

I want to introduce a few "last minute edits" and bring my presentation, fully revised to incorporate a few slides - beginning on page 2 - with the fact that it's Talk Like a Pirate day and that their main contact (me) is a Rennie!

So I'm wondering if I could enlist some aid to gather things, perfectly appropriate for a business setting, to include for TLAP in a PowerPoint presentation. I haven't even STARTED my own research but know there are so many of you that are SO resourceful, that you can probably help me faster than I can go to Google. Things I'm thinking of:

• History of TLAP day
• A few perfectly clean Pirate Jokes
• A few pics (I can nab those, I think! And since I have a desktop and handheld marshmallow catapult I think I'll take a few pics of them to add. I'd take them with me but I don't want to freak out  TSA with them in my carry on bags.)
• Any graphics I can insert which are free
• Things that pirates can do that others can't
• And lest I offend a few people right off the bat (which is too bad because I'm the customer so they'll have to suck it up a bit), perhaps an explanation that we're really talking about fun pirates like Jack Sparrow and not those in Somalia.

First on my list is actually to see if I can find some cardboard coasters with a Jolly Roger on it...if you have a source, save me the Googling, please?

So, any ideas, mateys?

[Betty Munro]

Things that Pirates can do that no one else can ...
   All names start with Captain.
   Men can wear beads.
   Pirates get to wear the coolest boots!
   Pirates can carry an assortment of weapons from any geographical area.
   Nobody asks a pirate, what would you like to drink, (isn't it always RUM?)

[Captain Teague]

How do Pirates keep their parrot on their shoulder?



Polly Grip...


I don't have any available resources to hand for ordering, but I get a lot of stuff from oriental trading company for most things.

One suggestion I may have but would take some work is to record some sound bites from the pirates movies that you could set up to click and play after you announce talk like a pirate day. Then during the presentation it could go something like this.


"Well, our numbers seem to be doing X"
*Click*  "Arrr, ye're right about that, Lass"

"And we certainly wouldn't want X to happen"
*Click* "Trim the mainsail, hard starboard, FIRE!"

*Following any particularly long part*
There are a lot of long words in there, Miss; we're naught but humble pirates. What is it that you want?

This can be aided by googling "Pirates of the Caribbean Quotes", easily bringing up the most memorable, the rest may take a little digging.

Just some thoughts. 

[PollyPoPo]

Snort, choke - gotta remember Polly Grip. 

[BubbleWright]

What's a peg leg pirate's favorite restaurant?........................................................................ I-Hop 

CLICKY>>>> http://www.piratejokes.net/

[Betty Munro]

Polly-grib!  I-Hop!!  OMG, I am splitting at the seams!!!

[DonaCatalina]

I pretty much keep my faire life separate from work. The guys in the warehouse are already terrified of me.

[Merlin the Elder]

ROFL! I can understand that, DC.  The "Talk Like a Pirate" thing seems to affect non-Rennies. One of the professors in my department came in during the last TLaP Day "ARRrrr"ing like crazy, and I don't think he's every been to faire.

[Lady Kett]

My coworkers are still not sure about this Faire thing but they all have pirate flags now! Even our cleaning crew has the little Jolly Rogers on their mop buckets! For Halloween, which our office does in a fashion to compete with any haunted house which charges admission, let me be a pirate cove!

My VP of HR did accuse me of making up a holiday until I pointed out that if I was making up a holiday, why would I do it on a day I was going to be out of town?

I will take over the world, one pirate flag at a time!

By the way, while long past, the presentation went great. I even converted my company's PPT layout into a pirate version for those pages. I actually seriously increased my PPT skills working on that sucker! So much fun. It convinced me the world needs to totally lighten up.

Yarrr!

[tiberiusflynn]

when I was a network technician a few years ago on campus I was one month into work and it was Talk like a pirate day. I started responding to everything on the radio in pirate, soon my co-workers did. After that, the desk jockeys in the office pulled their radios out of the mothballs and turned them on just so they could listen to us, LOL

After that it was downhill and our "radio show" became a constant in the offices.....to make it even better, we all dressed as pirates for Halloween and drove around campus fixing internet, etc in pirate garb. Made the front of one of campus' pamphlets.