My employer has a history of curious naming calamities. Read on to discover how I’m the worst offender.
NeXT, neXt, NExT
The convention employed in our x-Series is a lowercase “x” be in the product name. This was the first to deviate from a leading “x.” To this day, people can’t seem to get this straight.
What the flex
In the early days, these were marketed as flexible. They used a wound wire antenna thermal compression welded to transponders. Time showed the less the moved the better. A pivot to flex pcb made them more reliable in some ways and more delicate in others. “Flex” has become more of a reference to the material since the advise is to avoid areas of flexion.
x-Series
The expectation for our customers is that these injectable, bioglass implants. The reality of our label–casting aside the material lessons of flex naming–is that x-Series are any injectable implants. As seen by the VivoKey Thermo and xG3 v1r.
Bioresin
Okay, so this category is literally just a material name so it should contain all implants made from our bioresin, correct? Wrong. These are essentially the successor to the flex category. It turns out its less of a material thing and more of a size/shape/installability thing. This category faetures implants such as the dUG4T while side stepping the injectables and magnets that also use our bioresin.
It’s not just us
What exactly is a Lodestone? It seems to be a name applied to both biomagnets and peripherials that use them. Lodestone #### = biomagnet. Lodestone Pico = haptic peripherial. Lodestone Mouse = haptic peripherial. Don’t get me wrong, this is a sequencing issue, I feel. Naming the biomagnets lodestones seems to jive more than applying it to peripherials but the peripherials came first.
Homophones are the worst: glow edition
Me: It’s an injectable glowstick, what about GLOWSTIx?
Me: Wait-nope, that’s not gonna work.
Me: Fuck it, let’s just call it the xGlow
At this point, it was on brand.
If I had a time machines I’d rename the xGLO to xRad because of the extra radiation. 🤷♂️