I'm sorry to still be focussing on my employment predicament, but it is relevant to today's bit of factology. Claire has once again come up trumps with a lunch-based fact, however I can't seem to back it up anywhere and, much as I would love to write an entry based entire on my love for lunch, I've been blessed with facts today. The idea for today's entry first came to me when I was watching Seinfeld on DVD, as I do pretty much every night at the minute.
In the pilot sitcom within the show, Jerry mentions that Haagen-Dazs, the deliciously expensive ice-cream company, got their name from a phone book and are based in New Jersey rather than Dusseldorf, as their name might suggest. This also triggered something I'd learned about my other current mode of escape from this cruel, cruel world - the His Dark Materials books. The witch queen, Serafina Pekkala, got her name when Philip Pullman was nonchalantly flicking through a Helsinki phone book (presumably whilst undergoing a pretty severe case of writer's block).
This was all very interesting, but I needed another example, freshly learned, to bring it all together. I then, in a period where I was focussing on getting another job rather than desperately clinging to my current one, went to the Any Question Answered (the nifty text message service that does exactly what it says on the tin) website as I know they look for researchers from time to time. They are indeed recruiting, but suggested that potential candidates should try the service out to see just how good it is. And let me tell you, it's good (and I'm not just saying that because I gave them this blog address as evidence of my fact-finding abilities). I asked for a company or character name that came from a phone book, and they came back with the following:
Dixons got its name from the phone book - the owners of the first shop in Southend could only put 6 letters on the shop front so looked through a telephone directory to find a suitably concise name.
The original proprietors were Charles Kalms and Michael Mindel - who clearly took a different view to the potential reaction of the general public to a Germanic brand name than those Jersey Boys over at Haagen-Dazs. Ironically, the company decided to rebrand itself as Currys.digital recently, reducing Dixons to an online retailer, and making up for all those years the company suffered with a truncated name by giving it a name that is stupidly, unnecessarily long. Dixons also brings a couple of other notable facts to the table - its umbrella group, containing Currys and PC World, was at some point employed more people in the UK than any other company. My mate used to work in Currys - he didn't much care for it. It is also mentioned in one of the greatest sitcom scenes in recent years, the unseen sex scene from I'm Alan Partridge, in which Alan discusses the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre, while in flagrante, claiming that it would restrict his "access to Dixons". I love 'I'm Alan Partridge'- it is to my mind surpassed in the sitcom stakes only by Seinfeld. Which brings us nicely back to where we started...
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