On Monday, I went deep into my closet to find my one and only suit. It's a very nice suit, but a suit that I've worn maybe twice in the two years since I bought it. For all I know, it's hopelessly out-of-date by now. I'm now well supplied with nice, made-to-measure business shirts, but ties are a different matter. I have three of them, and one, so I'm told, is hopelessly outdated, while the other two are, maybe, a little flashy. I don't know - my understanding of clothes and fashion is a little shaky. All three of them were looking a little depressed, no doubt due to their enforced seclusion at the back of the closet, but nothing that a quick iron wouldn't fix.

By 8.30, I was admiring myself fully suited up in front of the mirror in the elevator. I still maintain that men look damned silly with a piece of colored cloth wrapped around their neck and dangling to their waist, but since nobody stared at me once I was out on the street, I guess I fitted in. I always feel subtly altered when I'm dressed like this; more formal, and, surprisingly, more self-confident. The self-confidence was going to come in useful since the whole reason I was dressed up like this was to give part of the presentation to a prospective customer for the software company I work for.

I don't know how many times I've written over the last two years how much I hate the sales process at work. I've steered clear of it as much as possible. However, our annual reviews are coming up, and one of the goals I was given for this half-year was to accompany a sales representative on a customer visit. So, since I'm not quite ready to be fired, no matter how much I dislike my job, I agreed to go with Mark, one of the few reasonably human sales people in our office, on a visit to one of the big San Francisco banks.

Mark is gay too, although you would never guess it. He's a self-possessed, cynical guy, maybe about my age. He seems to keep himself to himself most of the time; we're friendly to each other, but we've never really become friends. But he's likeable, and, unlike the rest of the bunch, I don't get the feeling that he's constantly thinking about how to manipulate me. Two "sales engineers" went along with us. I always think that title is rather glorified for a job that is something midway between sales and what I do. Privately, I used to think that sales engineers were people who weren't smart enough to be software developers, and not people-oriented enough to be sales "executives" (another glorified title).

But, in the case of at least one of the SEs that was in our group, that's not true; Regina is a short, spunky Asian-American woman. She has a very conservative appearance and demeanor, like many Asian-Americans of her generation, and is from a 100% different life-style than me. She's always bringing her six-year old daughter Courtney to work. Courtney is possibly the most precocious six-year old I've ever met. She sends us gay types in the office into hoots of laughter with the very strange drawings and cards she makes for us, and the little wrapped gifts she leaves for us for every conceivable holiday in the schedule. I'm not very good with children, and I can't always deal with Courtney's extroverted assault on my office; the other day, I heard her high-pitched, somewhat deafening sing-song approaching in the coridoor and quickly picked up my telephone to pretend I was on an important conference call. (I'm such a coward.)

The final guy on our team was Jeff, who's a slim, young, hunky Asian-American guy. I've always thought he was cute, ever since he joined our office about a year ago, but it was only when I saw him in tight jeans and a skin-tight t-shirt one casual Friday, that I've had the hots for him. A bunch of us regularly speculate about his sexuality; he seems too hunky and well-dressed to be straight. Besides, how many straight guys would wear a pink sweater? Against this hypothesis, though, he does practice Tae Kwon-Do. His presence and his good looks always leave me slightly nervous; he's so graceful in his movements and natty in his attire that I end up feeling like some hulking, ungainly monster around him.

Jeez, I didn't mean to set up this big description of our little group - all I originally intended to do was to mention that I gave a little sales presentation to a customer, Power-point and all. But the thing did go well, finally, although I screwed up as soon as I tried to use my Power-point presentation; I pressed the wrong key, and my slides disappeared. But I accomplished what I was there for; explained the higher technical issues, and answered the tough technology questions. And Mark, the sales guy, bless his heart, even wrote a complimentary email to my boss. (I'll pay Mark later).

Unfortunately, that wasn't my only encounter with our sales organization this week. Yesterday, without warning, I was catapulted into a nightmare project in Silicon Valley. An idiot of a sales person down there had pitched a sale to a customer which included $10,000 worth of consulting, over five weeks. The customer bought it, and now our sales people are finally asking us, "Hey, we told the customer you can do this for $10,000 - how about it?" This is NOT supposed to be how things work. What's supposed to happen is that the consulting organization gets involved right at the beginning, we make an estimate of the amount of work involved, and then tell the customer how much that work will cost, and how long it will take. So now, the sales idiot is in a tough position; he's promised the customer a bunch of work and a quick turn-around, while we're telling him that we can't possibly do it in that time and for that little money.

So, there were tense phone conferences last night, until well into the evening. The sales idiot would say things like "How long would it take to do A and B and C? We'd say, oh, that would take a week. Sales idiot would then say, so can you get it done by the day after tomorrow? Long, incredulous silence on the phone line. At different points during the conversation, it looked like I'd be either driving to Silicon Vally (at least an hour's drive) for a 7.00 a.m. meeting, and/or working all weekend! Fortunately, we've managed to throw in enough delaying tactics to make all that unecessary, although I still have to go down there tomorrow afternoon, which means driving back in Friday rush-hour traffic (which will take two-and-a-half hours).

I did something incredibly brave last night. I upgraded both of my PCs to Windows XP. I've been eagerly awaiting the new operating system for months, and I'm hoping that it will stop my machines from their bi-daily crash routines. The upgrades were surprisingly smooth; it took about an hour and a half for each, not including installing new drivers and new anti-virus software. And so far so good; the new systems look much nicer on the eyes, seem to run all my important pieces of hardware and software (although getting the webcam to work was a struggle), and, more importantly, haven't crashed yet!

Finally, on Monday evening in my film-class, we viewed the "dailies" from last weekend's film shoot. We all had very low expectations after the variety of disasters we experienced (empty film spools, over-exposed shots, wasted film), but it turned out that we had captured almost all of our shots, and have enough footage to assemble the complete script. I was one of the actors in about half the shots, and it was interesting to see myself on the big screen. I thought I looked incredibly tall and rather skinny, next to the other actor, nor did I particularly like my prominent adam's-apple and almost gaunt face. But I have to say I rather liked my smile - I never get to see that; nor do you :)