Technical Seminars
A certain large educational supplier likes to take Network Managers and IT Department Heads to what they call 'technical seminars'. They're basically glorified sales pitches, usually in some hotel or conference centre.

Now what happens when you force most 'normal' IT people to sit in a room listening to ideas that most of them either thought up themselves or have already discounted as fads and wastes of money...

...that's right, they turn to drink. Now, bearing in mind that roughly half the room are also teachers... you can see where this is going.

The 1st year I went, the sales 'team' was handed a bar bill of £6,000. Not bad considering there was only 40 of us there. Highlights included someone stealing all the bulbs out of the projectors in an effort to stop the afternoon 'session' and a Headteacher being caught balls-deep in one of the sales girls.
Scored a freebie copy of Office Developer and enough mousemats to use as coasters in the bar..

Next year was slightly different - obviously having not learned from last time, it was now a two day event. Now between my colleague and myself, we were looking at ordering the best part of £40ks worth of equipment and software each for our establishments. As a result, we were handed anything we wanted as a sweetner - cue a free copy of Exchange for me and enough wine to ensure that I didn't see daylight until 1pm on the second day. My roomate however was nowhere to be seen. He was too busy arranging his own 'volume discount' with the delightfully busty but alarmingly dense head of sales.

Aparently she loved the length (enough for a 10% discount).

They didn't run the seminars the next year - just sent a DVD instead.
( HSDriver was probably still at work on, Fri 9 Nov 2007, 6:41, Reply)