Sogger’s Blog

Last week, my boss and I hosted a 2-day training session for a major customer in Switzerland. The training was in English because the customer, a large industrial manufacturer, had French and German native speakers in its ranks. It all went very well, and the last session in the afternoon of day 2 was a question and answer session. We tried to set the tone by keeping it “high-level”, future directions for the product etc. In order to show willing, my boss wrote down the questions and we promised to take them into account during the upcoming roadmap discussions.

All went well and the questions threw up some interesting ideas. However, one attendee was well known for extremely long, pointless, unanswerable questions and the moment we had been dreading arrived as his hand shot up and he managed to butt his way in. He started on his question/monologue and eyes in the room glazed over.

My boss, ever attentive, was writing down the question. Hoping to exchange raised eyebrows, I turned to him, only to notice that instead of writing down the question, he was repeatedly writing the French equivalent of,

“What an ass-hole; What an ass-hole; What an ass-hole; What an ass-hole; What an ass-hole; What an ass-hole”.

I coughed discreetly and nodded at the large screen behind us: unfortunately, he hadn’t realised that his laptop was still plugged into the video-projector, so his words were projected, large-as-life, on the screen behind us. So much was the questioner into his subject that he never flinched and carried on with his question - he is a German speaker, so I don’t know if he knows any French. Unfortunately, many people in the room did, so ripples of laughter permeated throughout (there were 22 attendees). A quick tug of the cable caused the screen to go blue and finally broke the questioners attention.

Finally, the 10 minute question was fended off with an “OK, we will take note of your concerns” and the training course was over. Afterwards, the questioners boss came up to us and said, “Well, yes, X can be rather annoying can’t he?”.

So the golden rule is: Always check your video-projector cable isn’t plugged in when writing an insulting comment about an important customer. Take this with you through life, and all will be well.

Why the title? Well, in one of my favourite films, The Shining, Jack Nicolson spends the whole winter holed up with his family in a remote hotel in order to finish writing his novel. However, one day his wife discovers that he has written hundreds of pages, all of them saying only, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. One of the most famous scenes in the film (the one you see on the classic poster) is when he breaks down a bathroom door, pokes his head through and with a malicious smile says, “Here’s Johnny”. Class. Anyway, if you haven’t already seen it I’ll let you go and watch this cinematic classic and I’ll get back to writing up the questions ready for our roadmap meeting (omitting some of them of course).

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.