NOT A SALES GUY

I'm quite grateful I don't work in sales. Sales people seem to just disappear without warning.

One minute, they're sending round 'win notifications' with big numbers in euros, or dollars or yen, or whatever; the next, poof! What happened to so-and-so?

When they are here, the professional sales executives also seem to skirt around on the edges of stress in a way that's somehow both confident and tetchy. They enter the kitchen, swinging a mug on a finger and then exhale slowly, deflating tanned cheeks.

Then they remember why they're there and start punching numbers into the Borg Assimilator Coffee Machine.

It's high pressure, anyway, isn't it, that job? You have to pretend to be confident (or actually convince yourself anyway, in which case, what's the difference?) that the thing you're outrageously-enthusiastic about is going to solve all your customers' problems, end world-hunger and solve the crisis in the Middle East if they use it properly, and not accidentally let slip that it's been patched together with the equivalent of gaffa-tape, that morning. That cognitive dichotomy must fragment the soul.

Then, presumably, you wander into the kitchen, pondering ways to avoid thinking about the stuff you're selling, when you're confronted with one of the people who built it for you.

Breathe out. Punch numbers. Drink coffee.

I couldn't fragment my soul like that, I think. My face would give me away. A perceptive client would take one look at my red cheeks, ballooning above an uncomfortable looking shirt and tie, and ask me for an honest answer. I'd have to give it, or flee the building like Joseph on the way out of Potiphar's. Well, with more clothes on, but an equal sense of impending consequence.

Either way, I'd be sacked, probably - another so-and-so who was here one day, and vanished the next, without so much as a sniff at the Card of Many Signatures or a leaving do, clutching car keys and a P45.

Nope. I'll stick to writing about stuff I don't really understand, in documents that no-one pays much attention to. It's worked for me so far.