"We are dead clever and you aren't"

I just noticed that my favourite Enfield-based self-obsessed software company (no, not Ensoft, I mean the other lot) has a slogan, "Doing Difficult Things Well". Which strikes me as an exceptionally bad motto. Perhaps it's that I've always been wary of the adverb 'well'. What does this phrase mean, exactly? What led to this choice of words? The message that they are really trying to communicate is that they are clever. Much cleverer than you, in fact. That's why you need to hire them to solve your problems for you. But they can't say that directly. So instead, they just point out that the stuff that they do -- all of it -- is difficult. Really diffcult. But that's not enough. It's not enough to just do things that are difficult. Any fool can do difficult things. But it takes a special kind of fool to do difficult things well. And that's what they do. They do difficult things. Well. Well, they do difficult things. They do well difficult things.

But why stop there? Why not "Doing Difficult Things So Well we make them look really easy"? Or "Doing Difficult Things Well; While Caring Deeply about the Environment"? Or "Doing Difficult Things Well but Doing Easy Things Really Quite Averagely"? The list is endless. Apart from the fact that this is the end of the list.

It also makes you wonder how "Difficult Things" was arrived at. What other formulations were drawn up at great expense and then dropped? Possibly "Tough Stuff", "Tricky Shit", "Hard Problems", "Clever Gubbins", "Computery Fings" all were proposed before "Difficult Things" was accepted. What thought has gone into this slogan! Or rather, what thought has gone into this slogan? Too much, if you ask me. Oh. You didn't.

Now let's see if my awesome page rank can push this entry up above their home page...