The sales man dilemma

When working in R&D I felt like I was doing the real work. I was developing the system and the rest of the company were real leeches, living on my work.
Moving to a more Sales oriented job (Pre-Sale), your outlook on life slowly changes. The way a feature was implemented is so unimportant, and even whether we have it at all is no more than a line on a sales pitch. Those RD people are slow, lazy kids that know nothing on how the real world works, and we are really doing the hard, important work, selling the product, covering for all the defects that the programmers put in it, and getting the money that pays our salaries.
However, there are the sales people. They schmooze their way in life. They come to the company with a big contact list. They barely have an idea what we do. They set up meetings, as hi, and let me as the technical guy do all the talking and explaining. I then answer the questions, write all the paperwork, and fix their mistakes in the part they have to write.
And they get the commission on the deal.
The bastards.

Tho I get the feeling that the day I become a sales person, I will feel differently again…

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Lunch

Eating lunch is so much more than satisfying your appetite. It is an adventure. A gamble on your next hour of your life, for pleasure or pain. The obvious painful item is choosing a place to eat. With over 60 restaurants in our street,this daily debate can easily drive you mad. trying to get a random selection of 5 people to agree where, while each has over time collected several veto’s of places they abhor, is really hard. Even the finest restaurant will eventually taste like it’s menu is all spam, if you eat there too many times.

However, the place to eat is only half the challenge. Who to eat with is the bigger problem. I never eat lunch with the same crowd twice in a row. I take too much pleasure at the differences between the various crowds (Or shall we say, I go nuts with staying with the same crowd for long). Each group of people, from the different parts of the company, has it’s own characteristics.
Management – These people are always eating somewhere close, always arriving each at a different time (Busy important people, you know) and the conversation will invariably go back to that document that has to go out right after lunch to Brussels/Berlin/Malaysia… Or, even more annoyingly, how the yacht is letting in water and how hard it is to keep the big garden in the 2nd house.
Middle-Management – Again, stressed for time, but genuinely so. These guys really have to work today. Sadly, conversation levels may vary. A good day can give you the funniest and most embarrassing stories and gossip on group A, but on another day, talk about the difference between Router GW-45563/n and GW-45564/b, or the new IMAP protocol for mobile devices can last an hour. You need to hear it to believe it. It is painful.
R&D (My old gang, the programmers) – Again, like a good old Chevrolet, mileage may vary. From the best stuff, like recent movies, and what not, to detailed discussions about Java, and that annoying bug that keeps the new version (2.92a, of course, do not get confused with the old 2.92!) from coming out in time.

Either way, this makes for some interesting times.

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