One of my favourite Saturday morning activities is reading The Good Weekend magazine in the The Melbourne Age.  One of the pages I read had three standard segments. 

The first was about ‘Ordinary People with Extraordinary Jobs’ and I read about a man who was a snake catcher.

The second was Danny Katz’s Modern Guru, where every week he answers modern day etiquette questions and this one was in response to someone asking if they should have asked for their change when they handed over $30 for two drinks at a top end bar and the bar tender pocketed $5 for tips.

In the middle of those two articles was the ‘By Number’ section, where ten interesting number facts were listed.  All three articles were really interesting including most of the number facts.  When I finished reading the page, I thought to myself, ‘What I would remember in 48 hours?’.

So here I am in the office on Monday and I can still recall the information about the snake catcher.  That he makes more money cleaning up people’s backyards after the catch, then he does catching snakes.  Because even though he doesn’t charge a lot, most people still think that a shovel is cheaper.

I remember Danny Katz’s advice on how we should switch the whole tipping situation on its head.  So instead of tipping in high-end establishments we should only tip in cheap and cheerful places where the staff probably need their wages subsidised more.  He suggested that the more we pay the less we should tip.

I cannot, for the life of me, recall one of those facts that I found extremely interesting at the time.

Now I am not saying that no-one remembers facts and figures but the vast majority of people do not remember them, regardless of how fascinating it is at the time.

Worth remembering the next time we have to communicate something or do a presentation, because  one of the acid tests is what your audience would remember in 48 hours.

So take the challenge and tell us what you remember in 48 hours.