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| Chuck Lawhead - the Idea Guy
In 1981, Chuck arrived in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, where he met his two high school buddies, George and Ron. Chuck was pretty much a nerd, of sorts, even though he never really thought of himself that way... and, as luck would have it, so were George and Ron. (George probably didn't think of himself as a nerd, either. Ron seemed to have accepted the idea much earlier in life.) George and Ron introduced Chuck to Dungeons & Dragons, which Chuck had actually seen a couple years before. (Chuck had concluded D&D was exclusively for nerds - real nerds... taped glasses, pocket protectors, never without a calculator - so he wasn't going to have anything to do with it... ever.)
Rolling up a Fighter and a Wizard, Chuck was told he had to come up with names for them. Having never done anything of the sort, Chuck found that rather difficult. (It is difficult... come up with a name of this sort and it could become something that is attached to you for life! Trust me! I know!) Xynyx was one of those names.
"Why did Chuck tell me all that," you might be wondering... and that would be a reasonable thing to wonder. If Xynyx is the name of the business, why isn't Xynyx the name of the website? Because... well... because... Chuck was too slow. That's right, Chuck was pretty confident that he had a pretty original name there... couldn't see how there might be any threat that anyone else might come up with that name. After all, Chuck came up with it himself after hours and hours of research into names of lore... names that inspire average citizens to epic feats of courage... names that resonate with power... names that... nevermind; he wanted a palindrome. And he wanted the letter "X" in the name.
Chuck "always" wanted to have the name "Xynyx" as a dot-com... but that seemed, in his mind, at least, to mean that he would need to have a business... and having a business would have required having some talent or other marketable skill. More on that later. Suffice it to say that, on one of Chuck's routine checks to determine whether the name "Xynyx" was still available, he found it was not. Somebody started a company and called it "Xynyx". How did this dude come up with the name? Who knows? There's only 26 letters in our alphabet... it was really only a matter of time, wasn't it?
The most surprising thing is that this dude's company does not promote some sort of drug for sleeplessness or anxiety... kinda has that ring to it, don't ya think?
Chuck considers himself a Progressive. He supports a wide array of progressive movements and ideas... you know... like the idea that other countries and peoples exist, that the planet doesn't need us as much as we need it so we better start trying to take better fucking care of it... that sort of stuff. So, understandably, Chuck has been relatively enraged for the past 6 years...
and in 2002, the jackass who managed to get into the Office of the President of the United States of America nearly choked to death on a pretzel, which would have left the world in the clutches of an even more dreadful asshole.
But all Chuck could think about then, was, "I got a pretzel for ya..."
Chuck did not, however, possess the the ability to produce the product that he had envisioned...
what he needed... was someone with the appropriate talent... |