14. Promo

"Hey, guess what? Next Thursday there's a presentation of the new version of WonderCode in a hall nearby by the local reseller, free admittance. Interested?", goes my boss.
"Uh...", I mumble as I try to read the forwarded spam. "Well, a lot of buzzwords, I've read about it all already, nothing I really need, they've just added a few layers of complexity, really... But okay, I'll go, if only because of the discount for participants."
Great. Another wasted day. Well, at least wasted with a blessing. Not that I like WonderCode. I like to work with CodeSpew, actually. But there's not many projects out there I can use it on. You know, one thing runs on Windoze, the other on Lunix. Drat. But one thing I've learned is never show enthusiasm. If you show enthusiasm for one thing you're sure to experience a lack of it. Therefore it's only logical for me to try to show at least a bit of enthusiasm for this promo crap.
"Where do you work, sir?", asks me a person in a penguin attire. Like, don't they have a clue? You don't put a man behind the desk to handle registrations. Only boring men full of frustrations come to such presentations. I really don't need to hear their jabber. Not today. Why didn't they put a neat blonde behind the desk? That way she'd attract men I could compete with in constructing the most clueless cue line to ask her out. And not listening to those boring presenters that barely know to read from slides. Great, a reseller that has a woman with a feminism complex to handle promo organising. I mean, what other brains are capable of such a decision? I must remember later to subscribe marketing@bloodycoolsoftware.com to a hardcore site dealing in... Um, I'll decide about that later.
"Behind a long wooden desk cramped with monitors, keyboards, mice, and such."
Oh, crap. I must wake up. Not even a blonde would get confused over such replies. But I can't help it. A man handling my registration... Besides, it's early. 9:30 am. Just 5 hours ago I was ircing with a cute blonde from Bahamas. Nearly talked her into visiting me. Well, that sort of gave her away. Or, I should say, him. No blonde can resist my offer. I tell you, irc is full of men with frustrations and FBI agents pretending to be minors.
"Er, haha, sir. The company you work for, sir, please."
"Oh. Wiseguys, LLC."
Like, no way you're sending more of that spam to my boss. Anyway, upon his request I feed him more random information to increase entropy of his data, and then head off to take a seat and try to daydream about Bahamas. Yeah, right.
"I've just mastered BlatantlyEasyInterconnect Objects, and now they've built DataTrullyDirect Objects which should shorten the development cycle even further. I tell you, they do this only so they can sell new versions of their software. I mean, do I really need a new compiler? They already made a very good compiler, my programs work just fine. But when they introduce their new super-cool objects, we just have to use them or we aren't super-duper-cool anymore."
No shit, Newton. Only, you're sitting next to Einstein. Want to hear some stuff about the Cabal that's behind this thing? You're seeing only the façade. But, eh, why should I bother? When you've got a badge with your name on it and you're not keeping a low profile, you're only asking for trouble. Even if it's not your real name. Those guys can be very persistent. Frustration has to be dealt with very carefully.
"Oh? Well, they must be quite resourceful. But I wouldn't know about that, I'm not using any of the high-level components. I design and implement secure communication protocols."
"Interesting. How do you go about doing that?"
"It depends on requirements. But basically I just take whatever protocol people used before and wrap it with a module, that first compresses data, and then adds random bytes so some obscure cypher, like SAFER-SK128, produces different encrypted packets even on repeating data. Easy. And worth lots of money." Well, that quieted him. No common ground. Always take care of having no common ground with frustrated people.
"Hello and welcome to our presentation of the latest version of WonderCode!" suddenly screams the announcer. How awful. I can just see him using half an hour to tell us about the swell history of their great product that saved Earth a dozen times already. And a Mars rover, too. Which he does. Except for the Mars part.
"And now I'll let mr. Hardcode explain what's new in WonderCode 2005!"
Ah. At last something I can engage my analytical mind with. Not that I expect it to be interesting. I'll try to sort out useful information from all the noise. I always find it interesting how an exciting presentation ends with little or no useful data at all. But I don't really care. It's logical they want to earn some cash with lectures. What I care about is to smash those enthusiastic thoughts trying to lift some of the frustration from the depressing folks around me. Why should only I be miserable? Patience, patience... Soon a practical application will be on schedule.
"I think we all could use a break now. We'll continue in half an hour, and in the mean time please help yourselves to a little snack outside."
Caviar. It smells awful. How can people eat that? I have a problem fighting the smell already. I have a theory about that. I think that eating caviar causes you to turn into a manager. But my sample size is too small to do a statistical correlation. Carefully avoiding being contaminated by airheads I thread my way back to the seat with a simple sandwich. Nothing special, but if it's for free... A few nerds are already there. Actually, I think they didn't get a snack at all. People in perfect suits with ties debating some design decisions. Horrible.
"In the second part of our presentation we will see mr. Crackblues showing us some new things while building a few demo apps."
Boooooooring. All those things have already been published on the web. Months ago. Databases. They just can't leave databases alone. Every damn demo involves a connection to a database. Why can't they show us something interesting? Building a digital satellite signal decryption program would be such a neat little thing. I'm sure that presenter can build it within 10 minutes. Considering his fast mouse dance over the screen not telling us what key combinations he is pressing alongside, he's quite apt at doing anything in WonderCode. And then a clueless weirdo started quarelling about a database design. But it's not funny. That presenter really doesn't know how to make fun of the situation. Booooring.
At the end I should fill out a survey for the organisers to get a feedback on how we liked the show. As usual, I write: "I didn't get a free laptop so it could be better." And by the way, the upgrade for the low-end paranormal version of WonderCode I use is not subject to any discounts. What a waste of time. I should've been more active and throw expired milk on the stage. This will teach me to read the discount coupon first.