Senseless in Seattle

Sated from too much cruise-ship food and an obscene amount of postcard-style scenery, I interrupted my husband with a "Shhhh...can't you tell I'm trying to eavesdrop? The lady on the back row just said she works for Microsoft..."

I was primed for it by navigating the rental car in a mad rush from Vancouver to Seattle, gaping at road signage with names like Everette and Whidbey.

We were flying in the evening from Seattle to Las Vegas in order to catch the red-eye to our final destination (home), and most passengers were jockeying for an infant-sized pillow and a poor excuse of a blanket. Some, however, were engaged in the oh-we-have-something-in-common banter. (Never knowing whether that sort of thing would be considered more annoying than welcome, I typically fall mute when seated next to strangers. I imagine them telling their friends later, "I had the most considerate person sitting beside me…didn’t say a word.")

But the fellow talking to the Microsoft lady was saying plenty. Trouble is, I missed the part where he said where he worked. (Good thing for him.) I got the bit about the company he worked for providing contract IT services, however. He loudly went on to say something like this:

"Yeah, I was hired as a security expert...and I don’t know the first thing about security. Then they set me up to meet with these clients who've had like 12 years of experience in the industry...and I'm like, trying to wing it. Now I know how the game works so I just make sure I read up on whatever I'm supposed to present the night before."

Now those who are in the IT services or retail software business may relate sympathetically to this braggadocio, but I relate more. I relate to the demos of email archiving systems my colleagues and I sat through several months ago...only to later discover that the product we were demonstrated and the one we were quoted were not the same. Astonishingly, the one we saw had many more features and cost twice as much. Surprise! I relate to painful third-party implementations where we pay some outlandish hourly rate to "experts" and then end up telling them how to do their jobs. Because they have no version control in place, every time we get an update, it overwrites the customizations we paid for previously.

I know it's probably not exactly the poor drone's fault. Maybe he was hired by a company and in good faith believed he’d have adequate training before being released to the wilds of client contact. However, I now believe that I have something of a sixth sense, like the blonde on the TV show Mediator. Put me in the room with a vendor or consultant and within one paragraph or so I start getting mental images of competency or technological fraud. I'm too nice to purposefully ask probing, difficult questions in an attempt to see the vendor sweat, but sometimes it happens by accident because I simply have a need to know.

So, "Senseless in Seattle" (and other tell-all consultants out there) you might keep your voice down on your next flight. There's no telling who's listening, just itching to update their blog.