Hey Doc

Well, I met Mr. Murphy during my product demonstration this afternoon. Big boss had high hope to land this customer. This will be the ticket to launch our product and we will be sitting very pretty. I tested the product over and over since yesterday, to make sure everything works accordingly.

We were supposed to do a rehearsal run at the customer site before the demo but the conference room was occupied. Those people went over the length of their meeting. After we had waited for over an hour, we were directed to another room upstairs. As we walked into the room setting up our equipment, I hear a constant hum from a large motor, likely an roof top AC unit. That raised the background noises few db. I admit that our device voice output is a bit low but its perfect in a rather quiet place.

The introduction meeting went on for a half hour. Sales manager did his presentation, now its my turn for the demo. Our product is a home alarm/security device that monitors the house, make calls to a set of pre-defined phone numbers when intrusion is detected. So I set up the sensors and activated the device.

There were no intrusion alarms when I tripped the sensor, nothing, nada, zip. BUT, It was working just few hours ago ??!! I looked at the sensor, it was a wrong sensor, it was not the one I labored hours with yesterday. I grabbed the wrong sensor. I quickly corrected the sensor address to match the main unit and finished the demo. But it was too late. The first impression was ruined, damaged. This gave the customer a chance to pick on any small imperfection of my poor device. The voice volume is too low, HELLO? how about the humming noise in the background?? The case is not smooth, looked ugly, and so on.

The only saving grace was that they allowed us to come back in a month for a second chance, giving that we will fix all the "problems".