Demo Perils

I am copying an excerpt from this blog by a Sun employee.

It was about a Dtrace demo which went a bit out of hand.

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Last week, I had the opportunity to give a DTrace demonstration for a
highly technical -- and highly influential -- audience at a Fortune 100
company. When I demonstrate DTrace, I typically do a couple of invocations
on the command line before things become sufficiently complicated to merit
writing a DTrace script. And it was when I went to run the first such
script (a script that explored the activity of xclock) that it happened:


# dtrace -s ./xclock.d
Segmentation Fault (core dumped)
#

If you've never had it, there's no feeling quite like having a demo blow
up on you: it's as if you peed your pants, failed an exam and were punched
in the gut -- all at the same horrifying instant. It's a feeling that
every software developer should have exactly once in their lives: that
unique rush of shock, and then humiliation and then despair, followed by
the adrenal surge of a fight-or-flight reaction. In the time it takes a
single process to dump core, you go from an (over)confident technologist
to a frightened woodland creature, transfixed by the light of an oncoming
freight train. For the woodland creature, at least it all ends mercifully
quickly; the creature is spared the suffering of trying to explain away
its foolishness. The hapless technologist, on the other hand, is left with
several options:

1. Pretend that you didn't write the software: "Boy, will you get a load
of those fancy-pants software engineers? Overpriced underworked morons,
every last one!"

2. Explain that this is demo software and isn't expected to work: "Well,
that's why we haven't shipped it yet! I mean, what fool would run this
stuff anyway? Other than me, that is."

3. Make light of it: "Hey, knock knock! Who's there? Not my software,
that's for sure! Wocka wocka wocka!"

4. Suck it up: "That's a serious problem. If you can excuse me for a
second, let me get a handle on what we've got here that we can demo."

I always aim for this last option, but on the rare occasion that this has
happened to me (and this is -- honest -- probably the worst that a
customer-facing demo has gone for me) I usually end up with some
combination of the last three, often with plenty of stuttering, some mild
swearing ("Damn! Damn!") and profuse sweating.

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You guys ever given demos? Ever goofed up??

Rahul