Friday, April 22, 2005

The Prank is Mightier than the Pen (in which I get even)

One day at Virtucon, I was stuck giving a presentation to a vendor group (in from Cali) with a bunch of their big hitters. Essentially, I was having to explain how we deployed their literature management software on our internet system and how we're still having difficulty with it despite all their glossy brochures and bullshit answers to our technical questions.

A buddy of mine whom we'll call William is on the intranet side of the wall at Virtucon and was supposed to present some of our internal deployments which also were being a little hinky. So I'm doing outside and William's doing inside. Got it? Good.

The morning of the presentation, William fucks me. Leaves a voicemail that's he's sick, not going to be able to make the meeting, can I cover all of the deployment. I'm fine with it. I know a bit about what's going on inside but not to the extent of William, but I can handle the types of questions I'm likely to get from a bunch of suits.

Presentation goes lamely but fine. These things are like prize fights. If you're still standing when they're over, you can claim you won.

The vendor suits from Cali (three vp's, no waiting) hand out these velvet covered boxes with nice silver pens inside. As William fucked me, he's not there, we've got an extra. So I volunteer to make sure W gets his.

Back in my office, I take out the nice, shiny, silver pen and instead insert a blue, Papermate with no lid that I'd chewed on. Then I left the nice box with the crappy pen on W's chair as I leave for the day.

When he was done laughing, W gave that box to me. I still have it on a table in my office and always laugh when people open up and expect something nice and see that shitty pen.

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