Right there with you. My toaster died last week, just stopped popping up. Quickest thing was to chuck it and get a new one for twenty bucks. But I spent an hour taking it apart, found a crumb jamming the mechanism, and it works fine now. Feels like we've lost the patience for that little bit of troubleshooting. Always satisfying to fix something yourself, even if it's just a dumb toaster.

Ditch the script entirely. I did this at my last company after watching our VP read bullet points off a tablet for a solid ten minutes. It was painful. I switched to just having him list three key things he wanted to hit, then told him to talk to people like they were in the break room. He ended up having actual conversations instead of performing, and the follow up questions went from awkward silence to people asking real stuff about budgets and timelines. The trick is giving them permission to not be perfect.