OK, my latest D'OH moment. Set the scene. We have a large Australian Motor Vehicle Corporation, with retail sites all around Australia. I'm here developing a site for them that allows clients to come in, view all their vehicles records, from sales, servicing, etc. Really not that hard,. Anyway, we set it up, we go live, everything's good, we win a big servicing contract because of it, and everyone's happy. A week later is the General Manager's meeting. This is a financial planning meeting, so we have ALL of the General Managers from all around Australia, as well as the Joint Managing Directors, CFO, and all of the accountants. So, my dear friend the IT manager decides this is the perfect opportunity to get some extra funding for the IT detpartment. So, it's time for a presentation.
Get to the conference centre at 7:30, set up a demo server with some test data (there was no internet connection, not even a close enough phone line for dial-up (wtf!)), it's all working good. Plug my laptop into the projector, bang, it's all focussed, we're all happy. 2pm, it's time for my presentation. Get up in front of all these managers, start talking, explaining what it does, why it does and how it will help the business. They're all nodding, I've got the CFO sitting there saying "hmmm, the possibilities for this are enormous!". Now for the unveiling:
Me: "Now remember, this is live on the Internet at the moment, we have customers using this!"
Click
Here's D'OH number 1. My laptop fails to come out of standby mode. It just sits there, blank screen. It has NEVER done this before, it's a beautiful peace of machinery, and I keep it nice and clean for this reason. To the chorus of mild laughter and some sarcastic comments from the more cynical of the managers, I restart, and re-prepare for my unvieling.
Click click
Opera opens up, I go to the demo server, bling it all appears. Put in the username and password for the data of one of our bigger customers.
D'OH moment number 2. We have a header, a page body, and a page footer. Good stuff. Not so good. We also have a big red error message that says "Could not connect to database, please contact <blah>".
I concluded my presentation there, amidst quite a lot of amusement, sarcasm and general revelry, went and fixed the server (MySQL had crashed, god knows why), came back and redid my presentation, but D'OH! That was certainly embarrassing!