Question: Have you ever worked on any products that had undocumented features?

Answer:
Hah, no, but here’s one from a friend – it’s a medical device. No, not a “medical device” that’s really a dildo… an actual, real, medical device, for use by doctors performing outpatient surgery.

My friend, who shall remain shameless, was working for an industrial design company that had a contract to develop a small, hand-held electronic vasectomy device.

Yeah, everyone cringes right about now.

I cannot bring my courteous pen to further describe the nature of this device, other than as a form of non-invasive surgery to replace old-school methods that might involve slicing people open. The punch line, though, was the engineers’ internal name for this product: they called it the “Black & Decker Pecker Wrecker”.

(My apologies to the real Black & Decker, I have some of your tools, they’re totally great, and you’ll notice I didn’t use your name in the title of this post so hopefully it won’t be the very first thing that turns up in search results…)