I am the Widget Queen!!!
I was in a meeting this morning doing some training on Quoting (you know telling our customers how much stuff will cost them etc).
Yeah… it really was as fun as it sounds. :S
Anyway, in this meeting was … the General Manager, the Customer Service Manager, two Business Development Executives and four of my contemporaries (Account Managers) and Me!
We were having a discussion involving some hypothetical companies, one of which was called ABC Widget Co. … which elicited a doey eyed…. ‘what’s a widget?’ from one of the Account Managers.
Errr….. I thought everyone knew what a widget was – it’s just one of those things!
So the GM , who was chairing the meeting, explained “It’s one of those things in the bottom of your beer which aerates the drink or something when you open the can…”
Errr… like yeah…. kinda right … but no bonus points for you!
Then one of the Business Development Executives (now these guys are glorified salesmen… you’d think they’d know something about widgets) pipes up with “Really? I thought it was one of those little things you put on your desktop that tells you the weather or time and stuff”.
I am sitting here with knitted brow at this point, wondering how I am the only one in the room who knows what a goddamn widget is!
“Well actually 😉 … a widget is both of those things ‘now’. But they were likely called widgets because they didn’t know what else to name them. A widget was traditionally a term used in Economics as a hypothetical undefined product… it’s just a ‘thing’ when it doesn’t matter what the thing is.” Etc Etc Etc.
Sigh…
.