Shoot the whole day down

At BlogOz, someone mentioned the ill-fated rebranding (and then exceedingly quick backpedalling) of PriceWaterhouseCoopers‘ I.T. consulting arm to Monday. I think it was told as part of a larger story of tech-boom madness. But big stories like that are less interesting than personal stories, or stories made personal by having been there. My personal stake in this sad tale of the tail end of the web 1.0 boom is that I worked for PwC at the time (don’t ask why the W is capitalised in the full name but lower case in the abbreviation). It all happened about 6 months before I quit to become a researcher.

Whoever told the Monday story at BlogOz failed to tell the best part of it which is what happened when PwC bought IntroducingMonday.com to announce the rebranding ahead of the (failed) IPO but didn’t buy IntroducingMonday.co.uk which was instead bought by a cybersquatter and featured a blank flash (If I recall correctly) site with an annoying south London sort of accent singing:

We’ve got your name!
Na na na na na!
We’ve got your name!
Na na na na na!

Followed very briefly by a clip art donkey appearing and:

We’ve got your name!
Na na na na na!
This is a donkey!
Na na na na na!

It was on an infinite loop from then on as the donkey very amateurishly sort of bumped around the frame of the screen.

Hi-freakin-larious.

Especially to load it up on a PwC-owned laptop and play it in the office. As we did with great glee for much of the day.

PwC soon abandoned the Monday idea (did they not realise it was so easy to parody?).

Shortly after I left, PwC sold the consulting arm to IBM. After that, I remained in contact with a few people from PwC for a while, most of whom eventually left PwC/IBM for marginally less stressful jobs outside of the up-or-out culture. They told me that, having left IBM, they were now “Beyond Blue“.