Business Conference Blues

The Only Reason To Ever Attend A Business Conference With Your Boss

I am at a business conference with my boss this week, which means that I’m feeling pretty suicidal right now.

Business conferences are 10% truth, 20% lies and 70% beer. Right now my beer-to-blood ratio is the highest it’s been in years thanks to my boss constantly buying rounds at the hotel bar, which is probably the only thing preventing me from stabbing myself in the jugular with a free plastic pen or bludgeoning myself to death with a branded pocket calendar.

The problem I continue to have, besides occasional bouts of sobriety, is that Dick Lundberg, my boss, constantly and consistently believes the lies of these vendors… even when they’re not buying us beer.

I have tried to reprimand my boss about this several times but it usually comes out as: “Okay, I’ll have one more Amstel Light.”

Worse, my boss tends to rate the products of these vendors based entirely on the size of the lies. The more outrageous the claim, the more my boss believes the hype.

This is a serious issue and one which will haunt me for the next 365 days until next year’s annual conference. As soon as we all get home and dry out my boss will begin asking me about pieces of software he saw or some new data reporting package he read about, probably on the side of a free duffle bag.

“Tom, this is a great bag!” he’ll proclaim. “We should really look into this product. It says it will make our software fly! I always wanted to be a pilot…”

“Dick, their software isn’t even released yet. They just had a bunch of PowerPoint slides filled with nonsensical graphs and questionable buzzwords like ‘e-productivity,’ ‘cross-platform interdependent operability,’ and ‘data specialized datamart.’”

“Oh, yeah, that was a good demo. I can’t wait to buy it!”

“Dick, if we get this we’ll have to spend thousands of man hours and form a dozen management committees to convert all our existing data. We can do the same thing with Microsoft Excel.”

“Stop being so negative!”

My pain is compounded by the fact that this conference is centered around a software suite that is hopelessly outdated and clearly the last ditch effort of a dying company. It is an “enterprise” system which means that companies like my own spent too much money on it when they bought it 20 years ago and now they’re trapped into using this vendor until one of us goes out of business.

This dinosaur of a program is really just a tremendous database program which has cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last 15 years and doesn’t even offer a Windows interface yet (They’re claim: “It’s coming next year! Really! Maybe!”).

Windows came out in 1995. We’re now in 2007. Perhaps this company thinks using a mouse is only a passing trend.

Yesterday I attended an hour-long conference session where the show-stopper was…

Are you ready?

A pull-down menu.

This actually got a round of applause from many of the people in the room. My boss was one of those people. At that moment, a part of me died.

Maybe my expectations are too high or maybe I’m just jaded, but I tend to think that expensive enterprise-level software should probably try to keep up with the features found in software that’s 20 years old or made for grade-schoolers. Heck, a lot of grade school students these days could probably program their own drop-down menu.

In honor of this amazingly ground-breaking technology news, I’ve decided to end this entry with an incredible pull-down menu. I call it, “Things I need to do when I get home…”