I hate demos.

Our sales staff and several execs were in town today for a sales meeting, and I had to demo some relatively simple software I have been writing over the last few weeks.  All was well as of yesterday.  At the request of the CEO I made some cosmetic changes, nothing breaking.  Rebuilt, re-tested, all was well.

Then it was demo time.

And it blew up.

And I wasn’t surprised.

I’ve demoed enough software in my day that I can patter about why it happened, what to expect, why it won’t happen to you, and here let me explain what features I can’t show you because getting to them will make my computer catch on fire.

I almost immediately realized the problem, but there was nothing I could do about it at the time, so I did what you expect software to do.  I failed gracefully, and executed my finally block to wrap up the demo orally and tell them when they’d be getting it installed!

I hate demos.