First comes the walk-through of the system. Then fish sits with the senior salesman to get technical specs, while his boss gets the chance to explore more features of the software.

Reports fish, "The senior salesman says to me, 'Our system is completely idiot-proof.' From years of experience in IT, I know how wrong that idea can be and reply, 'If you think so, then you just haven't yet met a big enough idiot.'

"At exactly that instant, from across the room we hear the other sales rep say that the program has crashed.

"Turns out my boss was entering some data and got a message saying he could abort the transaction with ESCAPE. So that's exactly what he did. He typed 'ESCAPE' and pressed the Return key.

"Not only did he take down the application software, the entire system froze and had to be hard restarted by one of their techs before we could continue."