Lots of us did dumb/jerk things when we were younger; that makes it understandable, not okay. And would the salesperson with the now (for all practical purposes) broken demo unit agree that there was no harm?
As far as I'm concerned this was (1) a harmless prank and (2) a significant impulse to the sales person to up their knowledge of the device.
Obviously, your salespeople should be good at handling your knives.
But a knife salesman will never be as good as a chef, because chefs have hours a day, every day working with the tools of their trade.
And if you're at a trade show selling chef's knives, and there are no chefs in attendance, you're probably at the wrong trade show.
I would say it's entirely normal for a certain fraction of trade show attendees to know the products on display better than the salespeople demonstrating them.
I've worked booths. If something like this would happen to me I would definitely want to know more about that person, if only because he might be a potential recruit or a representative of an existing customer.
Personally, as long as a powercycle took care of the issue I really don't see the problem, if you do then that's fine by me. Breaking things is bad, afaics nothing got broken here.
The actions of OP were a 'Red Flag' not a 'Recruiting Signal'.
So either you accept the risks, staff your booths with competent people or you stay away from tradeshows. What point is there to have a salesperson there who does not understand what they are selling? At a minimum you'd have to study up on the device to be able to demonstrate its capabilities. If you can't do that then you have no place in that booth.
The fact that apparently even Bill Gates would mess with the systems at tradeshows (in much the same way, in fact) speaks volumes. This kind of behavior would have been very much expected in the tradeshow environment of the 80's.
In fact, if you went home afterwards and your gear still worked and wasn't stolen (either by the visitors or the nightwatch) that counted as a win.
This is essentially bigotry, endemic among arrogant groups of people with limited social skills, narrow understanding (and therefore respect for) subjects beyond their purview, but who might have developed some strength of understanding in their niche.
"What point is there to have a salesperson there who does not understand what they are selling?"
It's ridiculous to assume that a salesperson might have to have the same level of knowledge that an Engineer may have, and betrays a total lack of understanding of how organizations work, levels of expertise required.
Imagine if Engineers were required to have the knowledge and skills to have to actually 'sell' the devices they make, after all, why shouldn't they be expected to know how to 'have a conversation' and 'collect money'? My god.
You don't demonstrate spectrum analyzers, especially programmable ones if you don't know how to use them in anger.
I went to a music fair a while ago (ok, a long while ago meanwhile) to watch some gear demonstrated, the people manning the booths were musicians, and they were competent. That's the sort of interaction you strive for when you pick the people to run a booth at a tradeshow.
Otherwise the answer to every question about the device is going to end up with 'I don't know'. And that's potentially a lost sale right there.
Going deep on an aspect of the datasheet abd abusing it doesn't mean one understands a thing on the device (in its proper use)
Any competent user of that particular spectrum analyzer would have tried that first.
Why did the company not send an actual engineer to the trade show as well? I've done plenty of trade shows as a customer and there's almost always an engineer on-hand to assist with more technical questions and issues with the demo device.
Even assuming the prior claim, the company still screwed up not buying another plane ticket for an engineer.
Also, you could brick the device in a couple seconds with a hammer too. Should the sales guy have take down training too?
If thats an unrealistic argument, you failed to realize you were the only one in the room who couldnt see the hammer in your hands.
We have a different idea of what sales people should be able to do.
> Their job is to communicate what the machine does and how to do it.
How is this possible without knowing the ins and outs of a device?
> Also, you could brick the device in a couple seconds with a hammer too.
You could, but that's not what this discussion is about so I have no idea why you would bring it up. The device wasn't bricked.
> Should the sales guy have take down training too?
That's a straman of your own making, I will leave the demolition to you.
> If thats an unrealistic argument, you fail to realize youre the only one in the room who couldnt see the hammer in your hands.
You've lost me.
BTW, you are pouring out level-headed good sense all over this sub-thread and I'm loving it. Thank you. How are you so patient? :)
Also seems like many of these people haven't been to an engineering conference with demo gear out. And seem to be overlooking that this was 30-40 years ago, talking about equipment that'd cost $150k in today's money. That was an engineer or two worth of annual salary for the time period.
I'd damn well expect a sales person selling me a piece of gear like that at a field-specific conference to know how to use it and be able to reset the thing to factory spec in a pinch. Which seems to be exactly what the sales person ended up doing.
Sales people don't have a requirement to know systems to that depth.
The initial interaction was 'harmless fun' but re-instituting it and walking away was materially bad.
It’s only harmless if the prankster turns around and fixes the demo.
I remember some years ago there were people going around trade shows with universal remote controls turning off the screens. As far as I remember most posters thought that wasn’t a very nice thing to do. And that really is almost completely harmless.
Turning off screens with universal remote controls... hm... imagine what you could do with one of those 3 Watt IR guns they use in laser arenas and a highrise building. During the worldcup soccer... Never mind.
Also, there's random passers by as in "one table over at Starbucks" and random passers by as in "took the trouble to come to a tech conference". It is true that the latter are more likely to take these things lightly.
FWIW I worked the booth on a CAD/CAM show in Utrecht one memorable week in the 80's and the number of master mechanics that tried to get the toolbit to run into the chuck was rather larger than expected. Good that I took care of that in the software. But this mentality, of putting stuff through its paces and to show off what you can do with it is exactly why you have trade shows in the first place, to interact with people and to let people interact with your gear to see what they are up to and to strike up conversations. Not all of these pay off.
But sometimes the kid in the greasy jeans and the t-shirt is the guy that will land you the big contract, as opposed to the guy in the suit who passes by your booth just for the swag.
OP entering a funky command is not unexpected. But then purposely antagonizing the sales rep was a d*ck move in my book. If OP had just shown the guy "Hey here's what I did and what it does" that would be perfectly fine (important distinction, OP knew more than the sales guy compared to your case). But if the sales person was legitimately panicking that's not very polite, to put it mildly.
I ran.
I hope that in the salesman's place I'd have had the calm to say, "What that really necessary?" and let it go at that. On the one hand, the splatter pattern does not suggest a leak, and he could explain what happened and get points for being cool about it. On the other hand, if there is one high school boy (by calendar or by mental age) who doesn't know the trick, then somebody else could get splattered.