"Look, it's a new toy idea for the adult video stores. It's a DVD player/projector in the body of an R2D2 robot and it has all kinds of peripherals that plug into the USB ports to bring the action to the viewer... or viewers."
"You're serious, right? I notice that the box just has the robot shape on it with the word 'iHummer' on it and a funny logo with a Unicorn instead of an Apple. How will this sell unless it's got bright, colorful and flesh-toned photos of action on the box?"
"If the customer is in the store, they know what they want. The nice thing is that the peripherals are all add-ons to the basic cost. Just the basic unit will be pretty good."
"I dunno. I've got a bad feeling about this."
As all good ideas go, they get changed in execution. As always, managers at the top don't get clear feedback from those near the bottom, since the intervening layers of managers modify the upward-moving data. It is a truism that top-down management fails because those managers have their tops in their own bottoms so high they can almost see daylight. So, just like every other company, the disconnect allowed weird shit to happen.
First, someone suggested that a demo DVD be part of the whole package. That wasn't such a bad idea but then it was just a DVD with "Demo Video" written on it.
Second, the shipping department had a typo and a pallet of 16 of these units, all of them "basic" units, went awry. The store where they arrived couldn't make heads nor tails of them and send one of the units up to a buyer.
Third, that buyer used one of his own DVDs and watched the unit play his copy of "Serenity". The sound quality with a sub-woofer built into the unit wowed him almost as much as how well the projector worked. He ordered a hundred of the units as a test run.
Again, no one mentioned that a mainstream distributor had ordered the unit, even though the first order's volume was pretty big and amortized the development.
So the iHummer got into the mainstream. Kids even got them as gifts, or had their parents buy it for them. It seems a miracle in hindsight that not one of these people played the Demo DVD in the first three weeks.
Well, at least, no one admitted to playing it. It was strange, within the first two weeks, how many of these were bought for teen-age girls who whined and pouted until their parents bought it for them. It was, in its own way, a good replacement for the "Harry Potter Brooms" that worked so well as vibrators. The iHummer's subwoofer was even better.
No one is really sure why the secret got out, but get out it did.
What is perhaps oddest to explain was why none of the girls who had one of these players suffered from depression, anorexia or bulemia. They were very happy and well adjusted girls until their iHummers were taken away.
These were still available from adult stores, of course, and the volume sold through retail and the internet certainly didn't punish the maker or distributors.
Given the product's logo of a Unicorn with an odd-shaped horn, some folks started calling them "My Little Porny".
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Author: Jack C Lipton Title: iHummer Part: Universe: Protection or lack thereof Summary: Some toys are subtle Keywords: Revision: $Revision: 1.1 $ Archive: http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/CupaSoup/www/ Mailing List: FAQ: RCS: $Id: iHummer.x,v 1.1 2006/04/30 04:19:55 jcl Exp $