Chapter 1

Damn, I must be delirious. That couldn't have happened in this day and age, could it? Those things don't happen to me; I thought as I dropped down onto the king-sized bed.

I was supposed to have been here two days before, but every possible problem we could have on a short two hour connecting flight from Atlanta to Philadelphia happened. Of course this is normal for me. My luck sucks and that's why I force my company to let me fly out days before major presentations that cannot be rescheduled due to me being delayed.

You see, I am nothing special to look at; my eyes are so bad Lasik doctors laugh when I walk in. I have thick glasses, and carry around about thirty extra pounds. My hair is so wiry that I should have invested my first dozen paychecks in companies that made hair gel. Now I am not quite so bad that people walk right past without noticing me all of the time, just most of it. My only real leg up over the regular techies at work is that I can kick into a high energy mode when showing off tech offerings to non techies. Otherwise I would be stuck behind a bank of monitors like the rest of the tech talent.

Luckily for me, I am good at explaining the tech to the suits much better than any of our sales or marketing staff. I never lie to them or push vaporware features. Most times I even manage to convince them that if they make the purchase, our fees to add in the features they want, are better than reasonable. I do it so well that rarely does my company need to send up sales weasels to do the hard sell. Anyone sane would think that the revenue I generate would get the bosses to actually just let me do the whole deal, but the sales team has an exclusive contract that cuts me out of the picture entirely. I don't even get the commissions on the sales I make.

It is well known that my boss was castrated at birth! Everyone knows the sales department is useless and completely incompetent at anything but writing contracts that cover their own asses in perpetuity. How he ever managed to get brave enough to tell them that all of the commissions for my sales were going into an exclusive cost center for me alone is well beyond me. Too bad that was as far as he was willing to take matters. They drew the line at him giving me even a portion of what was left in the account at the end of the year as a bonus.

Just as with almost any sales presentation, the suits could care less when I pulled out my deck of cards sized laser-based Pico projector prototype for the presentation. For that matter, only one in a hundred even noticed that I was not using a pointer or mouse when doing the Power Point presentations. So far, none of them even got the fact that I did not even have a laptop. None of it was required; the Pico projector prototype I had was running Windows in a Linux VM and had dual cameras on the front to track motion. All I needed was to wear a ring on each hand that the Pico projector cameras could track. It allowed me to do the Power Point with a wave of my hand and zoom in on images like I was using a touchscreen. The techs, on the other hand, drooled! Using my toy budget, I built up a 32 core cloud server with 128 GB RAM and just over 7 TB of SSD using Intel NUC boards and Kingston V310 980 GB SSD drives. I started building it bigger, but then it would not fit so nicely in the clear acrylic case I found that was just a bit bigger than a ream of copy paper. I loved this rig! I was able to have all of our products and DBs running on it. More than once bullshit was called on me. No way could anything run that fast on just a little box like that.

When the presentation was done with the suits, I always used the company's dime to take the client's tech staff out for the best sushi in the area. Back at their office we would snag a big conference room to get down into the weeds on whatever product I was presenting that day. I never blew smoke up their asses with canned images and video clips like our normal sales and marketing teams. Out came the NUC cluster, Pico Projector and was hands on with the products and features the techs really wanted to see. Right off the bat I set them up on the embedded Wi-Fi built into the cluster and gave them each their own VM to play with the product. When any of them had a questions, I flipped over to put their VM up on the wall and go through it right there in front of everyone. If it turned out to be something the product could not do, I kicked open an enhancement request window on their VM and let them put in their input.

One critical requirement I put to my boss, as a condition to keep me from wandering, was to have a dedicated sales, marketing and tech resources waiting at the ready when I was doing presentations. They would get the enhancement requests in minutes of the prospective client's techs submitting them. If not by EOB that day, then by the next morning I would have pricing details for every requested enhancement. Each having full details of timelines to code, test, and verify. I was a fellow tech, so the techs got it when I said that they could then pick and choose which features they could not live without. I always used this to sweeten the deal. My boss thought I was crazy when I told him what I was doing the first time. I doubled our normal price of the product when we got down to numbers with the suits and bean counters. Our sales team went ballistic! I told the boss I was going to explain it to them and they were going to like it, or I was going to walk. He called a meeting. I made it really basic for the sales weasels. We bundled in costs for the top five customer requested enhancements into the total price, before discounts. When Sales started into heavy negotiations, they would throw in a two years of free 24x7 support. Then to sweeten the deal just a tiny bit more we would offer the client another free feature request. For the possible customers that were still wavering, we would then offer the client a 25% discount if they signed a five year support contract. Sales really bitched and moaned like a bunch of spoiled brats not getting what they wanted, the way they wanted it if I got involved in the sale.

I just let them rant as I pulled out my trusty Pico Projector and threw up a simple graph. It took the hardest headed of them about ten minutes to finally notice the room had quieted down and everyone else was trying to digest what I was showing them. Right there in a simple line graph, I showed the original list price they always discounted. Then I had my doubled list price, costs to implement the 5 most expensive new features to date for our most expensive product, two years of 24x7 support, the cut for my "commission" toy budget and then the 25% discount. Even the densest of sales weasels saw the fully discounted price was still 125% of our original list. They sold my methods to themselves and I just left never saying a word. Let them fight with the boss and board of directors to figure out what they were going to do with the new found revenue. Even discounting all the way down to our original list price still gave them plenty of profit for bonuses, if they could sell them to the board.

Not a damn one of them even acknowledged I existed when I was in the office. I am sure many of them only know my name because it was on every sales document and proposal to the clients I had visited. Another nasty trick I did when I was at the client. I told each client's acquisitions department that if they did not see my name on the paperwork, I was sure they were not getting the best possible deal. I always insisted that if that happened, they had to walk away because it meant my company was already breaching their trust and we have not gotten their business. No way was I having my name tied to dishonest sales practices. Have a few multimillion dollar deals getting pulled back, because some sales weasel was trying to eke out a bigger commission, quickly solved that problem. I can be ignored, get screwed out of tens of thousands in commissions a month and be sent off to peddle our products in the worst little shitholes of the world, but never mess with my toy budget.

That was just how it is. I was a tech that could sell the hell out of our product to the techs and do pretty well with the suits too.

Women, well forget it. Geeks don't get the good stuff. Sure sometimes I would get a geek chick so hot during a presentation to get a quick fuck in a janitor's closet. None of them looked any better than I did and yet they had a pussy, so they could get all they wanted at any time. My luck was always such that I could go into a room packed the real dumb blondes, that reinforce the stereotype, get them all stone drunk and they would get it on with each other rather than me. More than once, right there in front of me.

Chapter 2 »