Lorem ipsum

About ten years ago I was working on a software project for an engineering company that tracked job candidates. The company I was working for was trying to become their primary vendor, so we needed to provide a way of tracking which candidate was submitted to which open position. I was managing the project and was working with an outside developer.

Once we completed the product, we wanted to show it to my team before demonstrating it to the engineering company. Everyone was seated in our large conference room and the demo was going great, when the CEO asked if we were going to change the language to English. No one said a word, but there was a look of “what the hell did he just ask” on everyone’s face.

The thing is all the field names were in English. Finally, someone asked him what he was talking about. His response was that the data was in a foreign language. What had happened was the developer was using a Lorem ipsum generator to fill in the fields so it would show the formatting of the pages. 

What happened next has to be one of the best responses in the history of responses. The lead programmer starts explaining, in great detail, how the database tables are all normalized to the third normal form and that would allow us to change the language to whatever we wanted it to be. He never once explained to the CEO what Lorem Ipsum is or belittled him in any way. This guy was a true salesperson.

After the meeting was over and most of the people left, the CEO walked over and asked what language that was. Just as before the programmer goes into a long explanation and history of Lorem ipsum. A similar explanation can be found here https://priceonomics.com/the-history-of-lorem-ipsum/ The CEO said, “thank you” and left the conference room.

We showed the client the product and became the primary vendor. We also removed all the Lorem ipsum and entered fake data that matched the field names.

There are several takeaways from this story…

• Lorem ipsum is a great tool for filling out large text fields when you a testing things like webpage formatting. I used it when I was setting up this blog and was this that reminded me of this meeting. If you would like to use it there are a number of online generators available. Here is the one I use https://loremipsum.io/

• You don’t need to be a salesperson to sell.

• Learn about database normalization.

• CEOs are not all-knowing, all-powerful beings. Although, many seem to think they are. You know who you are.