I typed the following email this morning to a customer with whom I've corresponded pretty frequently over the past several months. He had emailed yesterday to point out some strange specs in the product description of an Iomega Zip drive listed in our online store. I was in a weird mood and decided to have a little fun with my reply...

"Hi Jim,

Lemme explain . . .

At a fast-paced, bleeding-edge place like [name of my company], where we strive to maintain up-to-the-second web site content that fits the times, we've naturally decided to subscribe to the "reader-response" theory of narrative interpretation, which figures so prominently in postmodern academia. This means that you, the reader, can read our "narrative", if you will, in whatever way pleases you. It is up to the reader, not us, to impart meaning to the text that they encounter. I personally have begun, in my own product descriptions, lifting whole paragraphs from Hamlet, or the Bhagavad Gita, or even sometimes just typing in stream-of-consciousness gobbledygook. After all, I can't control a text's meaning once it leaves my mind; after that it is subjected to the slings and arrows of outrageous consumers.

So, read the description of Iomega's Zip drive in whatever way seems best to you, and you'll be right on the cutting edge of life in the postmodern era. Your computer, on the other hand, is likely to be somewhat more of a literalist and may not accommodate the Zip drive in the way you have interpreted its description to mean. It is likely to believe that the drive is actually, literally, a 3.5 inch drive that includes a mounting kit which allows you to install it in a 5.25 inch drive bay if you'd prefer to use the larger-size bay.

It's anybody's guess why Iomega lists the Zip drive's width as greater than that of the 3.5 inch bay for which it is intended. Perhaps they, too, are being avant-garde in adopting a reader-response theory of textual interpretation. In that case, you have some latitude in how you wish to regard the strange size specification.

Hope this helps, or at least empowers you to accept your confusion over our product description as normal. (And *please* don't circulate this ridiculous email as a document officially representing [name of my company]!)

Cryptically,
David D."

The customer emailed back an hour later to say that he was LOL (fortunately).

Iss " 'Cryptically' is one of my favorite words" achar