Yesterday I was at a client site that was straight up business wear - not business casual like all of my other clients. This meant I had to actually wear a suit, which I haven't worn in about 5 years. Of course, I don't know where my old business stuff is, so I went out the other day to buy some new threads. I have absolutely no fashion sense, so I pretty much just bought what was on the mannequin because it looked professional. I also decided to buy a scarf because I felt like being Taki Soma for a day. I have no idea if the scarf went with the outfit at all, but hey, it was just a one day engagement, I may never see these people again anyway.

I was at the client site and thought I was just there to answer questions while they tested out the product, but I ended up doing a full on demo for them using my laptop. I told them to excuse any weird data I had in my test database - my database has courses in it with names like "How to Stalk Olympic Athletes", "Creating a Vampire Death Mask", "Underwater Basketweaving 101", and "One Fish, Two Fish - Choosing the Rght Fish for Sushi". I also have some interesting fake student names, like "Dana Scully", "Shaggy Rogers", "Jean Grey", "Neo Anderson", and "Raquel Ockmoneck". Hey, I gotta entertain myself at work somehow. They got a good laugh out of some of my data, and the demo went really well.

Since I wasn't expecting the demo, I wasn't at the presenter's stand when I was talking about the product, I was just sitting in the first row of the classroom, with my chair turned facing the rest of my clients. I constantly had to turn back around and work on my laptop as I did the demo, though the class just had to look at the classroom screen to see what I was doing. After the demo, we had a discussion on their needs and how they could use the product. We were in an intense discussion when I noticed some of the class snickering. I started to become self conscious and thought they were laughing at me. I then realized they weren't looking at me, they were looking at the screen.

The woman who sat next to me reached over quickly and wiggled my mouse, and that's when I realized what happened.

It turns out that my screensaver came on. My screensaver is just a compilation of a bunch of pictures from my digital camera that I've been planning on putting into a gallery. The class lost all interest in what we were talking about and were treated with pictures of flowers, animals, sunsets, cityscapes, and a picture of me and Dave. It was when the picture of me and Dave came on that they realized that all the pictures may not be for their eyes, which is why my client quickly moved my mouse to make the screensaver stop.

We all got a good laugh out of it, and I told them that all the pictures in my screensaver folder were clean. It was unspoken what kind of pictures they were worried to see, but we were all thinking it.

At the end of the day, we went over what were the positive things that came from our meeting. One thing that they mentioned was "It was a great thing that we had Christine here!"

Aww, phsaw, you didn't have to say that.

But even better was...

"We want to see more of Christine's Picture Show!"

Posted by Yano at July 13, 2005 08:24 AM

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