Demonstrating applications for customers is a haunted task. When doing a demo for a customer at least one thing will fail or result in an unexpected result; a brand new error, a debug dialog box with unwanted text, test content that should not be read by the ones you are demoing for etc. If it’s not the application then you have some other things messing up; no connection between the laptop or projector or no connection to the network.
This will happen even if you thoroughy go through your demo before and prepare everything, and you know that the application is working as it should.
It happened me today; for some reason the laptop decided to zoom down to 10% in Internet Explorer 7 ,when I should demo our application, as soon as I moved the mouse in the Internet Explorer window. When returning back to the office I found out that the ctrl-key for some reason was stuck.
But, since you know that something always will happen the real art of doing a demo is the knowledge of this and talking your way out of it or having a good backup plan.
Do you have any nice stories to share on this subject?