A couple of consummate sales engineers came into the offfice yesterday. These guys were so cloying and so obvious, it was all I could do not to laugh while they were in the room. I thought I'd record some of the things they said for posterity, so that after we exterminate the brutes, the incredulity of our children will be met with historical record.

"Pleased to meet you as always," one of them said once I'd made contact with his hand but before I had a chance to give him my name. (Really, that says it all but let's go on, shall we?)

One of our own group asked these two, "What does your stuff use for the backend? Oracle, or...?" He said, "Oh, yeah, we're Oracle, J2EE, the whole bit." That these two brands could seem to constitute any kind of whole was amazing enough, but he went on: "As a matter of fact, we just got Oracle 10g the other day, and I get to play around with that a little bit; that's pretty fun." For those not familiar with the landscape, let me give an analogy. This is something like a guy who works for Mack Truck walking into a Porsche chop shop and saying, "Yeah I just a new pre-release big rig the other day. I like to take that out on the roads and noodle around with it." "Hey this get is like us, but he gets to play with some cool stuff."

But we arrived at the height of pandering when he saw an O'Reilly book on my desk and with a big grin, said, "Oh, hey. I learned Perl from O'Reilly University, too!" As it happens, this wasn't an introductory Perl book, and I learned Perl from bloody man pages. But, I suppose my own indivudal characteristics shouldn't get in the way of his stock jokes filed under "Connecting with Engineers" and "Building Tech Cred with Clients."

"That's a good book," I said.

"Of course, I'm still on the Camel book," he said.

Good luck with that.

They shouted "J2EE" and said "you plug it in and just works" a few more times and left the room, like automaton marionettes with big grins and tucked-in shirts.