Watch This!

When I worked at High End Systems, we used to sell a strobe light called Dataflash. It had an 8-inch diameter clear plastic dome, and the first versions of it were made of breakable plastic. But in the second version, the dome was made of Lexan, which is virtually unbreakable. In the demo room at High End we had an 8 x 8 matrix of Dataflash mounted on the wall and it was programmed to play patterns and effects. Richard Belliveau, one of the owners of the company at the time, used to bring customers into the demo room and tell them how tough Lexan is. It's used for bulletproof glass and for the windshields of helicopters, he would say. And then to demonstrate how indestructible the domes were, he would walk up to the display, remove one at random by spinning it off of the fixture, and then he would slam it down on the floor as hard as he could. The floor was concrete and it was covered by a thin layer of colorful carpet, so it was very hard. The Lexan dome would bounce around but it wouldn't break.

Richard taught me everything I knew about lighting when I worked at High End, including how to sell customers on the features of our products. Soon I was emulating his demonstration of how durable the domes are.

One day, I brought a customer into the demo room and I said, "Watch this." I spun a dome off of one of the fixtures and walked to the middle of the demo room. With all the flare I could muster, I slammed it to the ground as hard as I could. Much to my dismay, it shattered in a thousand pieces.

Apparently, someone had replaced one of the Lexan domes with one of the older style domes and that happened to be the one I randomly picked. When it broke, I was embarrassed and I waited with baited breath for the customer's reaction. Would he laugh, cringe, or walk out in disgust? None of the above. He said, "Wow, that fantastic!" He loved it.