Whine, whine …

During my short stint as a blogger, I’ve visited numerous other blogs. I wish I could write as well as Pok Ku, Kak Teh and Mok Cik Nab. And how I wish my subject matters were as interesting as theirs. But then, if I were half as good, I wouldn’t be confined to my 10ft x 10ft cubicle looking at numbers all day long, right? Instead, I would be working for some television station or publisher and rub shoulders with the who’s who in our local media scene. Alas, I must get in touch with reality and admit that I’m just a new blogger whose motivation is entirely selfish, for I only write about myself and what concerns me. I do get the satisfaction from churning out heaps of rubbish that clutter my heart and mind, but I don’t know whether my readers are any wiser after reading my blog. I must thank them for allowing me to indulge in this pastime. When I started this blog, I thought that I would only write beautiful stuff. I didn’t intend to burden my readers with my whining and bitching. Unfortunately, pretty soon I discovered that I had run out of stuff to write about and that it’s fun (for me at least) to whine. So, please forgive me, for in today’s post, I’m going to be a little bit bitchy. Yesterday, I had the privilege to attend a presentation by some people from the Twin Towers trying to sell their software. An address in the Twin Towers always gives a powerful impression to me, so I had high expectations of the presenters. I also knew before hand that the product they are presenting is one of the best, so I was looking forward to finding out more about it. True enough, the product is excellent, the methodology is good, but why did I leave the room feeling a little bit pissed off? Firstly, the Business Unit Manager or whatever his position is decided to ask us the current software that we use in the office. He then decided to keep comparing his software with ours throughout the 3.5 hours presentation. I mean, it’s fine to suggest to your potential customer that your product is superior, but is it necessary to say so every few minutes, as in ours can do this, yours can’t; ours is flexible, yours isn’t; ours have no limits on the number of characters, yours don’t; bla bla bla. It got tiring after a while, especially because we already informed them on the onset that the new software we’re looking for is for a new subsidiary and not as a replacement for our existing software. It also undermines the person who made the decision (not me) to purchase our current software. Then when we told him that we wanted to see the module that relates to parts management, he wasted no time in telling us that previously he had worked in a large manufacturing company that has huge number of parts inventory. The rest of the presentation was spent reminding us of his working experience and how he could share his experience with us. His pronunciation hurt my ears too. Now, I don’t exactly have a crisp English accent, but at least my job does not require me making a sales pitch to potential clients. All I expect is a decent level of pronunciation from someone of his position. Now try this: “In East Malaysia, the load is bumpy so a lot of spare parts leplacement … we lun the system parrel duling the test lun, so you no need to worry … our methology is sound…“, and that’s just the beginning. At the end of the presentation, he told us that our Japanese partners didn’t seem to understand what he was saying during another presentation to them earlier. He asked whether he spoke too fast. My boss chose not to answer that. Fortunately, his two colleagues were far more tolerable. The techy guy was very good, he could answer almost all of our questions. The other guy spoke a maximum of ten sentences, so obviously it’s hard to find anything not to like about him. My boss asked them to prepare another presentation with more focus on certain areas rather than giving a generic overview. Mr Good at Everything promised to allocate his resources to prepare the materials. I hope we could see more of what the software could do in the next presentation. I also hope that someone else will do the talking.