Monday, March 1, 2010

Mounting the Manpack

Your ever-eager narrator has been working under the roof of this kingdom for nearly two years now. Many moons have passed, and much inanity has been witnessed. The crown gem of the inanity is not the antics of less-than-honest nobles or being told that the kingdom has been granted great amounts of gold, and to celebrate, they’d use the gold that could have been used to give its subject raises on mountains of doughnuts and oceans of coffee. The crown jewel of the Kingdom’s office idiocy the chosen nomenclature of the products we sell.

We’re dropping the faux-medieval mixed with Clockwork Orange speak for a moment so that you can appreciate the full effect of this. I still may refer to myself in third person, but that is only because I’m an arrogant bastard. One product we make is radios. They are good quality radios by which many customers swear. They work under pressure, after getting wet, after numerous impact shocks, et al. A radio of such good quality should have a name that commands respect; something that commands respect, that illustrates how rugged yet compact it is. The company decided to go with the term “Manpack”…ok, a homoerotic allusion would not be the way I would go, what with all the military and police customers we have, but maybe they won’t notice. What about the smaller radios, the ones that people can carry with them? Oh, we’ll just call it a “hand-held” radio. That’s fine. But what if I am in a vehicle? I should be able to lock my hand-held into a docking station to charge it and amplify its power. When I’m ready to go, I can just pull it out and be on my way…until we have an official presentation to a customer regarding the docking station and hand-held radio, where we call the function of taking the hand-held out of the docking station “Jerk-and-Run technology”. So I’m really going to jerk and run with my handheld, which is next to my manpack.

Back to the Manpack, the latest one had a naming issue (besides the “Manpack” thing); a competing company is in the process of trademarking the term, HCDR, which is another nickname for one of our manpacks (oh yes, there are more than one). Our marketing team has come up with a new name: MBNR, or as someone skillfully pointed out, the “M-Boner”…The M-Boner! Why don’t we go full hog? Let’s make an antenna called the Muilti-Environment Amplified Transmission Pole, or “MEAT Pole” for short? We can shove the MEAT Pole right into one of the rear inputs of the Manpack, thereby making it a super M-Boner? It will be three times as powerful as the jerk-and-run hand-held.

I am quite certain that one of two things is happening: either the marketing director is getting naming suggestions from his/her 13-year old son, or we have hired “What-She-Said Industries” to do all the naming for us. Regardless, it is getting more and more apparent that the Emperor is not wearing clothes…KFTC.

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