Fairmont Toastmasters Club

[Alfred Martinelli]

Alfred Martinelli:
Ice Breaker Speach "Taking Chances" (March 24th, 2005)

Introduction:

I would like to introduce Alfred Martinelli. Alfred is a man of many talents, most of which you may not be familiar with. He's a businessman, he's an avid rowing enthusiast, he's a hockey player, and he's a man who travelled across Canada by train to spend ten days in beautiful Alberta with his beloved wife. Alfred keeps us all laughing with his insights on life and his daily witticisms. The most important thing one can say about Alfred is that he needs no introduction....

Speach Script:

Living in Toronto was something I never thought of while growing up in Montreal. To a Montrealer, Toronto is known as the city where the perimeter gates close at 11:00, and the people live to work, rather then work to live. However, although I didn’t know it yet, my life was about to change on September 6th 1996.

Hello, my name is Alfred Martinelli; I grew up the youngest and only boy in a family with three sisters. For those of you who are feeling bad for me right now, don’t be. I’ve been told numerous times that I was quite spoiled, and always got away with murder. Nevertheless, I still felt like I needed more, and until this day still demand it.

In September of 1993, I began my studies in Hotel Management at LaSalle College. During those years, I worked at the Sheraton Four Points as a Night Auditor over the summer, and on weekends during the school year. I know, I know, those of you who are thinking: what is a college kid living in Montreal doing working nights on the weekends. Spare me I’ve heard it all before. Although, working while I should have been partying, did have its perks. I was able to save enough money to buy my brand new Honda Civic, and push that so-called 1978 Chevrolet Malibu into the St. Lawrence River. It was also during that time where I met Carmela, my wife of seven years, since she was also studying Fashion Merchandising at LaSalle. I still have some friends today that attribute me landing such a catch because of my new car.

In June of 1996, I graduated with a degree in Hotel Management, and continued working with the Four Points for the summer. Carmela and I got engaged that summer, and we were planning our wedding for October 4th 1997. Everything was going great; we were on top of the world. And it wasn’t until September 6th that I realized we would need to move from Montreal if we wanted to have a better life. That night I went to work and saw my schedule reduced to Friday’s and Saturday’s, as was the norm for the past three years when I went back to school. So why should things be different this year?

Here I was, fresh out of school, trying to find work in the Hotel Industry at the end of the summer. That’s like a fisherman trying to fish in the middle of the afternoon, after all the fish have already eaten. I spent that winter collecting back the money I contributed to E.I for the last three years. And to make things worse, I had my father constantly telling me about the other things he could have done with the money he put towards my tuition.

That’s when I asked Carmela if she would consider moving away from her family, to go live in Toronto. After some discussion, we decided it was probably the smartest thing to do. After all, it’s only five hours away, so what’s the worst that can happen? We fail and have to move back to Montreal and in with her mother. “Yikes”!

But things are never as easy as they seem. It’s now October 1996, and we are still one year away from our wedding date. God forbid we move to Toronto and live in sin. What are people going to say if an innocent, wholesome, Italian Catholic girl moves to Toronto to live with her fiancé out of wedlock? However, with all that being said, we knew moving to Toronto in the fall, after the hotel high season, was not an alternative. Therefore, the only other alternative was advancing our wedding date to April in order to be in Toronto for spring.

After all the arrangements were made, Carmela and I planned a four day trip to Toronto. After all, if we were going to live there, we might as well know what it looks like. The purpose of the trip was to look for areas we could live, as well as visit the hotels I would like to work for. I was able to network with a few Front Office Managers, however finding an area to live was a little more difficult, since we did not dare leave the downtown core. However, overall we thought the trip was a success.

On April 12th 1997 Carmela and I got married. After our 10-day honeymoon to Sandals Jamaica, it was back to Montreal on Wednesday in order to pack and be on the road by Saturday morning. After cramming all of our possessions into the back of a minivan, we had everything we needed to start our new life, except for jobs and a place to live. But we were convinced we would have a place by Sunday night: “NOT”!

You see, nobody told us that we needed to have a job in order to get a place to live, since in Montreal all you need is a bank account and a couple of post dated cheques. So we decided to put our possessions in public storage, and check into a hotel for the night. On Monday I began calling the contacts I met a few months earlier, and was able to get two interviews that week. The first at the Canadian Pacific Skydome Hotel, the other at the King Edward. Although both interviews went extremely well, both had the same thing to say: “Unfortunately, you do not have a place of residence, so we can not hire you, even if we wanted to. Please come back when you find a place to live.”

I think you are beginning to see the no-win situation we were in. I can’t get a job because I have no place to live, and I can’t get a place to live because I have no job.

After days of apartment hunting, and evenings in our hotel room crying, we were minutes away from going back to Montreal. Then it happened, and it was all the motivation we needed. Carmela had just gotten off the phone with her mother, and she said that David, her brother-in-law, told her mom that within one week, Carmela and Alfred will be back in Montreal, eating out your fridge. Four days later, we had signed a one year lease for a condo in Mississauga. And within a week, I got a job with the Skydome Hotel.

In Conclusion

We’ve now been living in Toronto for seven years, and I am proud to say that I am still working for the same company that gave me my first job in this city. Today my wife and I own a condo on the lakeshore, and are successful business owners of a Faces Cosmetics Franchise. I remember what Thomas A. Edison once observed: “many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Thank-you