[kabdib]

It's the cautionary tale that you cannot believe the words coming out of a salesman's mouth.

I used to work in a startup where the cubicals had sequential phone numbers. From time to time I'd get a call from one of the sales reps in the field.

"I'm talking to a customer," the rep would say, "Can our product do X?" Where 'X' was something like, oh I don't know, 'Computational Sushi' or 'License plate recognition,' or anything unrelated to what our real-time messaging middleware did.

"No," I would tell them (but using more words).

Then I would move to the next cube and instruct the engineer sitting there that the phone was about to ring, and that they should pick it up, listen and say "No" quite firmly. Repeat for the remaining cubicals.

Salesmen will say anything to make a sale. It's what they _do_.

[chiph]

We used to have customers who would do that. They'd call every number in the company until they found someone who'd say "That sounds do-able." Upon which they'd demand a price reduction because "Your product doesn't do what you said it does."