This post could also be titled, “always take robby’s off the cuff advice with a grain of salt.”
or
The “I’m feeling lucky” button wasn’t so lucky for Tony and his new app.
Last November, I was spending the month in Anchorage with my friends at Pangomedia, and my friend Tony asked me if I had any ideas for what he should call his new resume tracking application that he was working on. Contrary to what he says on his blog, didn’t tell him to name it “robby”, my head’s not that big. The way it went down was, I happened to be watching Strong Bad Emails, and the first thing I looked at after he posed the question to me was Strong Bad’s computer, Compy. So feeling the need to come up with something mildly witty in less than 3 seconds, I said, “oh that’s an easy one, call it “Jobby”. For lack of anything better at the moment, it became the temporary joke name, and then after a while, just ended up being what everyone was calling it. Yay, Robby brands an application in under 5 seconds.
Fast forward a few months:
Last week, I get an email from Tony, letting me know that Jobby just launched and is getting pretty favorable reviews on sites like TechCrunch and Ajaxian. The site is getting crazy traffic, and he’s really excited about the response it’s getting. Then he starts noticing comments that are showing up in peoples blogs about it:
“Jobby”(TM) means “turd” in Scottish.
Interestingly, “jobby” is what my grandma used to describe going to the bathroom to do the Number Two (i.e., poop) when I was a youngster.
and my personal favorite:
Jobby – putting the number 2.0 into the Web.
We were both like “huh, we’ve never heard of that, that’s probably pretty obscure, probably nothing to worry about…”
Then Tony IMs me a couple minutes later.
google it… Definately scottish slang for poop.
The TOP two results are dictionary sites clearly specifiying that it is, in fact a not-uncommon slang word for crap.
It wouldn’t be so mortifying if that was caught BEFORE unveiling the public beta, but their site is getting tons of traffic now and all the world is seeing that they unintentionally named their site after poop. They even used the url gojobby.com. Oh, the pun fodder! I think all in all, it’s not a fatal misstep, and if anything it sparks a LOT more word of mouth about the site and the service (it looks like a pretty kick-ass service, that doesn’t hurt either). I hope it ends up working to their advantage, that way I won’t feel so bad about contributing to something so mortifying.