Bell item #41020

By Todd Stadler · Wednesday, February 11, 2009 11:58pm

I recently got one of those emergency (or safety) hammers that you can use to shatter your car window (as well as slash your locked-up seat belt) should your car manage to plunge into water or whatever.

It's a mildly morbid item — like life insurance, it involves pondering awful accidents — but given that my car trips frequently take me over the Willamette River, one that might come in handy some day.

But that's not what I want to talk about. No, I want to talk about the piece of paper that came in the packaging for this emergency hammer. Because while there's not much that's funny about a car plunging off a bridge (except in The Blues Brothers, and that's because it involves Illinois Nazis), I still found myself laughing at the instructions to a device to be used in such an event.

And it's quite possible I'm the only person to laugh at these instructions. Not because I'm the only one who would find them funny — if I didn't think you also would, I wouldn't post this here, as I obviously care about you, the reader.

No, because I'm probably the only person, until now, who bothered to read the instructions at all, much less laugh at them — at least ever since the mindless drone from Sector 7-G cranked them out. Or so I'd have to imagine after reading stuff like this:

Fig. A: If I had a hammer ...

So the first thing I noticed upon perusing this fine piece of corporate literature was that they absolutely fail to give the product a name. The header identifies it as "Item #41020", while the introductory paragraph goes by the more oblique "This Bell product" and "your new Bell product". But then by the second header and paragraph, it's back to good ol' "item #41020".

And while it's possible I'm not the only person who has read the instructions for "this Bell product", I'm definitely the only person who imagined how the meeting went when they named it:

Bell employee #1: Well, we could call it the LifeHammer. Which is a bit dull. How about a pun referring to its use in automobiles ... maybe the Auto-Mjöllnir? Though I suppose Norse mythology is a bit passé these days. Perhaps M.D. Hammer, in reference to its life-saving skills?

Bell employee #2: It's a freakin' emergency hammer. We don't need to market it. What's its model number?

Bell employee #1: Um ... 41020.

Bell employee #2: Gentlemen, I give you ... Item #41020.

Bell employee #1: Don't you think people might confuse it with the marketing we're doing for Item #41002?

Aaand that's enough of that. But it's not just the deeply generic name they gave it.

No, it's also the off-tone boilerplate their copy-editing automaton seems to have accidentally left in. Specifically, mentioning "the performance that will bring you continued enjoyment for many years."

This is, of course, the product-information-sheet equivalent of that ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times."

I mean, people, Item #41020 is a device that, according to this very information sheet, "is designed to be used in the case of an auto accident in which the seat belt cannot be unfastened and/or the windows and doors cannot be opened"! I do not want to "enjoy" using it, much less for "many years"!

In fact, I would get much more enjoyment by remaining completely ignorant of its "performance": Does it work? I have no idea, because my car has remained in non-life-threatening condition since I got Item #41020!

And that's all I have to say about that.