The worse demo EVER!

A couple of weeks ago we received the usual bothering phone request for a live demo, this usually comes from lazy and sloppy companies, which instead of trying things out, want somebody else to evaluate things for them, which is just nonsense. Actually it is not even the companies directly, it's some overpaid and actually actively damaging "consultant" (called useless consultant from now on). The first thing I told the guy is that conference calls and remote desktops sharing always have technical problems, and that this things usually don't work out well, why don't they just try the damned software? But he insisted, ignoring my warnings.

Then he sent almost a book of "specifics", smart questions like "can one access Teamwork through the web?" or "does Teamwork have reports" (having reports made sense when before the web, in pre-history, IBM AS400 applications were incapable of giving feedback in real time). This specific requests were just so silly that it inspired writing a blog post about it, which actually was quite successful. The heart of it is how silly the useless consultant is.

So I said: ok, now that I've put him in public shame, the guy and his crappy corporation will leave us in peace, and finally they'll buy some horribly expensive ActiveX 1982 "project management" software which fakes the web and runs in InternetExplorer 5. No! The guy was non pissable: he still wanted a demo, and still carefully avoided trying anything out. We agreed that we had just to do a short demo, ignoring the specifics.

Still, he kept sending new documents, always shorter and more nonsensical. I did SHIFT-CANC with all that junk mail.

The day of the demo came; the guy sent me a phone number to call, which was supposedly a free 800 number for international calls. Of course, it was only free from the US, and actually it was the wrong number. I suddenly remembered that I had to leave the office for a personal irrelevant matter, so I left Roberto there to do the demo. The rest is what I have been told by the guys in Open Lab, when they recovered from the hysterical group laughter state in which I found them when I came back.

So it went like this: the guys started calling again and again, Roberto tried to instruct them about the desktop sharing session, but it seemed that there was nobody there listening. When finally Roberto managed to get some attention, with the background noise in Open Lab of our 24/7 table-tennis tournament, he overheard skeptical laughs coming also from the remote session; evidently nobody was taking the demo seriously, and even they understood that the useless consultant was just useless and clueless. So, as we were also paying for the call to this crappy company, Roberto simply asked "so what you want from us?"

The guy (the useless consultant) at the other end was shocked by the question which supposed the presence of some intelligence on his head planet, so of course the answer was vague "well, Pietro [me] knows what to talk about" - to which Roberto answered "but Pietro is not here"

At this waiting for Godot exchange, Roberto overheard at the lazy brains end several people getting into a state of unstoppable laughter: so many things had gone wrong, and they were shouting "And Pietro is not there! And Pietro is not there!"

The useless consultant suddenly interrupted the phone call. That is when of course I came back (Gino holds that it is not by chance, and that all the time I disappear when there is any real problem).

Ok, it was all a waste of time; but we did have a good time at the end of it!


P.S.: After this all-time worse demo, believe it or not- the useless consultant wrote back! Calling me Giancarlo instead of Pietro (in what state must his mind be while writing to "Pietro Polsinelli" and calling me Giancarlo, a most unlikely name???)! And asking for customer references (still work on our part, and still avoiding trying the software). Maybe they pick bizarre suppliers in order to have a good laugh now and then? The world of IT is just toooo bizarre...