Product Demos and the Third Circle of Hell

Because I work in the sheer heaven that is corporate America, I occasionally have to research and implement new productivity-boosting software and systems. This means spending hour upon hour on the phone and in web-based meetings and in real-life meetings having sales jargon shoved down my throat and having my questions regarding pricing artfully avoided.

Side note: Sales people can all take a long jump off a short pier.

Anyway, eventually the endless amount of data requested by the company intent upon supplying the product is magically compounded and manipulated into ‘What We Can Do For You’, and then comes the next, and in my opinion, the worst, wave of unpleasantness: The Demo.

Three or four snappily dressed salespeople grinning like a toothpaste commercial show up at your office—sometimes with snacks, which, okay, fine, everyone likes snacks—and waste an hour of your time explaining to you, in granular detail, what their platform does that is so stunningly spectacular. Odds are, you already have a decent idea of what you’re looking at so one or two things during the demo might be exciting and new. The vast majority of it, however, will be the equivalent of a remedial course in HR/Payroll/Project Management/Sales Integration/whatever the product is tailored to, and you’ll want to gouge your eyes out with a spork.

You can stare daggers at them all you want, but these salespeople are hardened professionals. They will go through every facet of their product in painstaking detail regardless of your chosen hurrying tactic. You can try to speed them up by asking questions about the possibility to integrate their product with others you already use or the intricacies of data output or possibilities for reporting, but you’ll always get the same answer, “That’s a great question, we’ll get to it in a minute when we move to the next section of the demo.” You can try the age-old, “Yes, fine, ours does something very similar so after a little practice we should be good to go,” but it’ll be the same story; they’ll just say, “Hey, great!” and pick right back up where they left off.

It’s infuriating.

And that, friends, is why I believe that product demos should be the primary form of torture in the Third Circle of Hell. I’d break it down this way: The First Circle would full of the souls of people who were relentless assholes, and I think the ideal punishment there would be an endless stream of minor annoyances. The Second Circle could be petty criminals, low-level tax-dodgers, that sort of jerk, and they could suffer permanent head colds. The Third Circle would be all the salespeople being forced to sit through product demo after product demo, each presented in painstaking clarity and at a pace most people would find maddeningly slow. Deputy devils with pitchforks could enforce a ‘no sleeping’ rule by poking any offenders sharply in the posterior.*

“But why are all salespeople automatically in the Third Circle?”

Face it, they’ve already got the qualifiers for circles One and Two in their vast portfolio of sleaze, and they’re definitely a special breed of terrible. There’s also a nice ‘the punishment fits the crime’ feeling to it. “Peter Jones, you spent your years on Earth being a horrifying sleazebag, selling unnecessary product upgrades to unsuspecting people, fooling them out of funds so that you could invade Aruba every July, get mind-blowingly drunk, pinch every passing waitress’s bottom, then go home and expense the entire trip with no regard to the laws of taxation in your area. You shall now spend eternity sitting through product demonstrations given by Gilbert Gottfried with no recourse to a fast-forward button!”

::cue evil, booming laughter, accompanied by thunderstorm effects::

“Hang on,” you say. “Not all salespeople are jerks. Some of them genuinely believe they’re selling a great product!”

Oh, my sweet, darling little cherub. Yes, those salespeople do exist, you’re right. So do the salespeople who do it because it’s a job and the money is good. But there is an overwhelming number of people who go into sales as a career who harbor a secret hatred for their fellow man, an unyielding sex drive, an iron liver, and an ego so enormous they have to buy a second seat on the plane for it. I can count on one hand the times I’ve met a salesperson who didn’t leave me feeling like I needed a shower—in 90% isopropyl alcohol. Their fake smiles do little to hide their greed and the fact that if they thought they could get away with it they’d do their entire demo with their hand up your skirt (or down your trousers, depending upon said salesperson’s proclivities.) Seriously. If you ever want to bed a salesperson, start spouting commission plan percentages at them—that’s their dirty talk.

Actually? An eternity of ear-splitting product demos might be too good for them...



*In case you’re curious about the other circles, 4-6 are up for debate but 7 is for people like Hitler, and they have to listen to ‘The Song that Doesn’t End’ on repeat. For eternity.

“What I Did on My Summer Vacation”

I have recently returned from a two-week whirlwind tour of England. I started in the north and worked my way south, finishing with a day and a bit in London before flying home. I was able to spend several days each with three friends I hadn’t seen in eons. I ate too much, I drank too much, and I had a wonderful time.

Of course, I now find myself in need of a ‘vacation from my vacation’, but never mind.

For those of you who are not aware (apologies to those who are,) I spent two non-consecutive years in England during my college career. Thanks to the internet, I still have relationships with several people over that side, and I decided it was high time to pay them a visit. It had been too long. They had all gotten married, and had babies who were now old enough to be left with a sitter if we wanted some grown-up time, and moved around the country to places I hadn’t been before.

Yeah, okay, I thought. Now seems like a pretty good time to do this.

‘Now’ being a year from when I had the original thought. Booking international flights needs to be done forever in advance, and when you’re planning to visit people you want to give them as much notice as possible, especially when they have small humans to be dealing with. Emails were sent. Dates were negotiated. Flights were booked.

And then I sat around for months with people asking me if I was excited to be going, and I would respond, “Oh, yeah, that. It’s months away. I’ll get excited later.”

And then suddenly it was a few weeks away and I realized I needed a raincoat. And a bunch of other stuff because I’m a girl and sometimes I like shiny things, okay? Anyway, a flurry of Amazon orders later, I was ready to go.

And go I did. For sixteen days.

I was as far north as Kendal and as far south as Staplehurst. I was in the Midlands. I covered a whole lot of ground in between — on trains. Lots and lots of trains. So many trains. Side note: trains in the UK are so much better than trains in the US. They actually get you to where you need to go in a reasonable amount of time. It’s amazing! It’s as though they were built just for that purpose! But I digress.

I just spent two weeks with people I don’t get to see, like, ever. It was awesome.

I miss a lot of things about England. I miss the ease of transportation and the junk food and spending time in the pub. I miss places and things, but mostly I miss the friends I made there. I didn’t have the funds or the time to make it to their weddings. Their babies were born without a visit from their American auntie. A lot can happen in a decade, and a lot got missed because there were a few thousand miles between them and me. It’s kind of a bummer when you think about it.

But, I was just able to spend two whole weeks there and I am thrilled about it.

I got to scramble up a hill in the Lake District before a quick change of venue which led me to tootling around the city of York where I was able to see the Minster that figured so heavily in my college art history textbooks, and the city walls, and The Shambles (the street they based Diagon Alley on in the Harry Potter films), with a little side trip to the beautifully kept grounds and gardens of Castle Howard.

I got to have tea at the restaurant in the newly rebuilt Royal Shakespeare Company theatre followed by a performance of the current RSC production of Macbeth on a standing-room-only ticket (which was super lucky because it’s pretty much sold out for the remainder of its run in Stratford-Upon-Avon before it transfers to the Barbican in London). I got to visit to a really stellar butterfly farm and wander around the Cotswolds.

I got to go for a really nice walk in the Kentish countryside with an impromptu visit to a farm shop, and to spend some time at Leeds Castle (which isn’t in Leeds at all), and then there was a brief meander around in a building housing over eight thousand teapots and a town full of shops selling goods made by UK-based artists and craftsmen.

But the best part of all was that I got to share all of those experiences with friends I cherish. I guess what I’m saying with all of this is that friendships take persistence, and sometimes they also take uncomfortably long airplane trips. But they’re worth it. I try to live by the mantra, “We make time for what’s important to us,” and this was me making time. I’m really glad I did. Who knows? If I hadn’t done it, maybe everything would have quietly drifted further and further apart until these friendships were nothing but memories. Happy ones, but memories nonetheless.

But instead I decided that memories weren’t good enough.

Next time, though? They can suffer through eleven hours of pretending to be an airborne sardine…



***You will probably get more thoughts from this trip in the future, so stay tuned. Unless you don’t care, in which case, whatever.***

Can somebody please explain to me why ‘live albums’ are a thing?

Seriously. They’re irritating.

It’s one thing if it’s one of those “An Evening With”-type things they do live from the Kennedy Center or whatever — those are broadcast on television and meant to be watched. I’m talking about when artists record live concerts from the Podunk County State Fair and Greased Pig Wrangling Competition and then release them as albums.

If you’re going to do that, at least give us the courtesy of a studio-recorded ‘Greatest Hits’ album. That’s what you’re giving us, but with all kinds of obnoxious stuff included. Obnoxious stuff like:

Crowd noise — Inevitably, at the beginning and end of each song on a live recording, there are several seconds of applause and shouting. This is always exponentially louder than the actual song in between, so you spend an inordinate amount of time jumping out of your seat being startled by the sudden ruckus and adjusting your stereo volume down and then up and then down again. Also, if you compiled all of those seconds of crowd noise and cut them out, you might have room for more than ten songs on the album. We know you sang more than ten songs at the concert. (Right? ‘Cause if you’re doing ten-song concerts for the price of tickets these days, you’re a grade-A douche canoe.) And speaking of grade-A douche canoes, there’s always that guy who decides to let out a whoop of extraordinary volume during the quiet and tense portion of a deep and meaningful song. I fucking hate that guy.

Terrible audio — While we’re on the subject of noise, let’s talk about the quality of recording you get at a large venue. It’s shit. The acoustics are wacky, if the performer turns their head just a little too much you can lose their voice altogether, and you can hear all the ambient noise about as well as you can hear the artist. If the recording was made at an outdoor venue, you get wind and airplane flyovers. If it was indoors, the sound of the crowd is amplified, and it’s more than just their voices; it’s their snacks and their moving around and their inability to be quiet during the music.

All that talking — I want to hear you sing, not yammer on for ten minutes about...I don’t know, pick a topic. Introducing the song and maybe giving a little blurb about why you wrote it or what it means to you is fine, it’s when you start into a monologue about something completely unrelated that it gets silly. I suppose the fault for some of this really falls on the record producers and editors because they allow these recordings to go to production with all that chatter, probably so they can:

Charge a bundle for the recording — “Oooh, it’s a live recording! We can charge double for that!” I can’t believe people fall for this, I really can’t. You get a scant handful of songs with a whole bunch of yammering in between and all of that excess noise, but it costs one-and-a-half times as much as any of the artist’s other albums simply because it was recorded live. It makes no sense.

And the final coffin nail, vocal fatigue — I sometimes wonder at artists managing to keep their fans after hearing some of their live recordings. Autotune and the confines of the recording booth keep their secrets. Being live on stage does not. I’m not slagging off anyone in particular, though I can think of a few people who seem to be heavily reliant on vocal tuning software. Mostly I’m talking about the fact that any vocalist, regardless of their natural abilities, gets tired. You’ve been singing and talking and having a good old time for an hour or so and you still have some songs left in your set, but the quality suffers because your body has had enough, thank you very much. I’ve heard some of the most amazing singers go astoundingly flat at the end of a concert. It’s not their fault, it’s just biology, but it shows them at less than their best and recording that and distributing it to the masses at an inflated cost with all the other crap I’ve already talked about is just dumb. Also, I know how suckful it is to miss your notes, so I feel bad for them, and they’re probably feeling bad about it standing up there with everyone listening, so sure, why not, let’s record it for posterity!

Now, I know that there have been some pretty amazing and unexpected live performances, and when recordings of those are played it’s kind of fun. Like times when some other artist randomly shows up to do a number with the performer whose concert it is? That can be neat. But most of the time, live albums are a complete waste.

...I’m realizing now that I’ve just written something akin to a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up routine.

“So what’s the deal with live albums?”

I’ll show myself out.

Social Media and Self-Flagellation

We’ve all read the articles — or at least the headlines; let’s face it, clicking through is such a chore — that tell us something which ought to be completely obvious: social media causes anxiety in the human animal by way of fostering the habit of comparison between oneself and literally everybody else.

We’re back to that whole ‘the grass is greener’ argument. Part of this is evolutionary. In order to survive, you have to be bigger, stronger, faster, more attractive, a better provider, et-survival-of-the-fittest-cetera. These days it’s less about not being eaten and more about showmanship, and in the grand scale of problems to have, I’m inclined to worry about not having the newest shiny thing rather than whether or not I’m going to become lion chow at any point in the near future. Oh, people still show off their muscle, obviously, but it’s usually as a sideline to some sort of product placement or nutritional plan or exercise regimen rather than “Look at me, I can kill a man with a single blow of my mighty fist and therefore will protect you, and our progeny will be robust.” It’s more than that, though. Our unlimited connectivity to the world and each other has given rise to the opportunity to rub our successes in our friends’ faces and share every single moment of our daily lives with anyone who cares to give us a follow.

There is a societal tradition of gossip journalism, and social media has effectively taken that old horse and put it on steroids. I can call on another adage here: ‘Curiosity killed the cat.’ We do have a choice in all of this, of course. We can chose not to engage. We can chose to do something else with our time. But we are an innately curious species and we want to know what’s going on behind the closed blinds at number 23 across the street. It was easier in the days of check stand tabloids, though — you could skim the cover and get your fix and forgo actually buying the paper itself. It’s harder (not impossible, but harder) to forgo ‘the thing everyone is doing’. As an example, my first Twitter account came about as the result of peer pressure and lots of vodka. I deleted it not too long after, because the platform was new and not that entertaining to me at the time.

When I decided to proceed with this blog thing, I went back to Twitter as a way to (hopefully) reach a wider audience, and it’s a completely different beast now than it was ten years ago. (P.S. Yes, you can follow me on Twitter! @isignalforcows) It has introduced me to a community of writers I would probably never have known existed if I hadn’t decided to embark upon this blog crusade. It’s been incredibly helpful in that arena, and most people will tell you that as a networking/finger-on-the-pulse tool it can be a wonderful thing.

It’s the other side of it I sometimes have trouble with.

I follow a smattering of celebrity-types* because I appreciate their respective bodies of work, or their personal philosophy, or because their tweets are hilarious or sensitive or thought-provoking, or D) all of the above. Normally I’m not too bothered by the things these accounts tweet out because it’s far enough removed from me and my day-to-day that it’s more like a check-in. “Oh, So-and-so is doing a thing, doesn’t that look nice, I hope they’re enjoying themselves!” But I have one outlier, and that’s where the problem is. This person is, in my eyes, That Person Who Has Everything Going For Them All The Time. I know that there’s always the argument that people who seem to have everything and put out that permanently happy vibe can be covering something else, and that’s a very valid argument, but when all you’re allowed to see is the good stuff you focus on that and that’s what makes it an issue. Obviously I’m speaking for myself, here, because I’m sure there are some of you who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about your life in comparison to anyone else’s, and for that I salute you. You are a stronger human being than I. Truthfully, I generally don’t go in for that comparison thing. I’m doing just fine, all things considered. There’s no good reason for me to want more than I have. But this one person knocks me for a loop every. Single. Time.

“So just stop following this person,” I hear you say.

Yes, well, you’d like to think it’s that simple, wouldn’t you? But I have this incessant need to have at least one thing in my life that needles me in a way that’s at the very least uncomfortable. I can be something of a glutton for punishment, but there’s a purpose to it. It makes me strive to be better. In this case it’s this person’s people skills, their management of relationships of all varieties — their partner, their children, extended family, friends and friend’s families, colleagues… It’s an extensive list, believe you me. Bottom line, this person is Very Good at People. I am Very Not Good at People. I am trying to be better. This person is, in part, driving that pursuit. It is not unheard of for me to see one of this person’s tweets and bust out sobbing at the honest, raw, loving purity of it.

“Work on that, you infinite fuck-up,” I tell myself. “If they can do it, you can do it. You’ve never had it because you weren’t taught how, but you’re a grown-ass woman and you can sort that shit out on your own now. You do deserve that, and you can find it. Now stop whining and get the fuck on with it!”

...Though, in the spirit of total honesty, the thing that incenses me the most is the fact that this person is a fucking Critter Whisperer! When I talk to birds, they don’t talk back. This is bullshit!



*I say ‘types’ because if I had to rank my ‘Following’ list the most famous people on it wouldn’t be people at all, they’d be entities like the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Well, that might not be 100% accurate. More people might know who Bruce Campbell is than know about the MBA...