We’ve all seen business names like that; ones obviously designed to vault a business to the top of alphabetical listings. But I always like to give special attention to those businesses whose names either wildly overpromise the fabulous experience you’ll have by patronizing them… or else just display the absolute minimum effort in choosing an evocative name that will stand out in the marketplace.
Around the corner from my house are two businesses that inhabit opposing ends of this spectrum (though they’re practically next door to each other). In the oh-my-god-this-business-can’t-be-as-exciting-as-it-sounds end, we have the Action Duct Cleaning Company:
Found another one across the street from the first two yesterday.
Far from being the Time-Travel Agent’s office or Alternate Universe Phase-Shifting Skunkworks I’d been hoping for, it turns out that Realities Phase II is a nail salon.
Sure, that’s what it says on the sign, but if you go into the last booth on the end, and ask for a specific combination of nail procedures, your chair sinks through the floor Get Smart style and you’re in the secret base.
Not too many people spend too much brain-bandwidth thinking about humaneness and how it applies to plants, but I gotta imagine that The Rented Plant has about the worst life-expectancy (to say nothing of quality-of-life expectancy) of any denizens of the green hopefully-non-sentient lifeforms.
Imagine being that ficus in the corner of the clinic’s waiting room. No version of Obamacare will ever make sure you’re watered more than once a month. And you’re just lucky nobody decided to hang you in the Gents’. You’ll never see a ray of natural sunlight again, and the lease ensures you’ll be replaced just as your systems begin to fail.
And may the Leafy Goddess of Eden save you if you get rented out to a Hollywood film production. You’ll be yanked from your nourishing soil bed, stapled to a wooden framework to obscure the grip trucks parked behind you, and spray-painted green to immortalize your crucifixion on the altar of the Silver Screen.
