The Last Word: Ho ho ho

OPINION: Retailers’ bonanza day is looming large on the calendar. Punters still insist on using the antiquated Christmas moniker, but here at Rabid Reseller we know it’s our annual opportunity to sell gobs of gadgets that have spent the rest of the year super-glued to the shelves.

That’s what is known in retailing as a meta-four, because only four of our products were actually super-glued to the shelves, and it hasn’t happened again since we unfairly dismissed the no-good nephew.

But lots of other perfectly good products, sans glue, seemed to be affixed to their shelves by some sort of high-tech gravitational multiplier effect, which is usually only available to small dogs when resisting their owner’s demands for de-couching.

What a difference the festive season makes! Same products, same shelves, with the judicious application of oodles of tinsel and smiling Santas and the jingle bells you can hear are coming from the cash register.

The annual pass-the-parcel festival forces punters to load the SUV with something for everyone in the extended family and these days everyone is a geek of some sort, even if they’re only an MP3 geek. Rabid has made an extra effort this year to appeal to all those iPod owners, and the relatives of iPod owners looking for suitable stocking-stuffers.

Now we don’t expect to sell too many actual iPods, since that’s a market for people who actually care more about their relatives than their wallets. Instead we’ve got plenty of essential add-ons for iPod aficionados.

For parents with truly unruly offspring we’ve got the iProd. This clever device adds a prong to the end of your iPod, which emits a 50,000-volt shock whenever the built-in speech recognition module detects a sentence containing an expletive, in conjunction with a child’s name, and terminated with an exclamation mark. The iProd is pre-loaded with the most popular names for children, and for a small fee you can download updates from the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. For parents who eschew expletives there is a companion module tuned for euphemisms.

For that relative in law enforcement we offer the iPlod. This low-cost add-on allows your iPod to detect crowds of teenagers milling about in shopping malls, and on approach the built-in speech synthesiser asks in a burly voice: ‘Hello, hello, what’s going on here then?’

An optional upgrade supports the automatic detection of sports hooligans and research is continuing on the robbery-in-progress detector. The iPlod is also very popular with iProd owners who fancy a vocation in vigilantism.

If there’s a real geek in the family, why not give them an iPhD? This nifty upgrade to a standard iPod takes the bog-simple interface and makes it virtually impossible to find any song or photo unless you have a PhD in rocket science, and even harder to make it play your chosen song. This does for iPods what Rubik’s cube did for Lego.

A word of warning if considering this gift for young children — it’s always embarrassing when a five year old makes technology look trivial. Far better to give this one to grandpa.

The iProud module is a software upgrade that forces your iPod to play ‘You’re beautiful’ on an endless loop, as well as making it respond favourably to any question about the owner’s appearance. Just ask your iProud ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ and it will respond ‘No way!’

Each iProud is factory-customised to the DNA of the owner and if operated by non-authorised users will switch to an endless loop of ‘You’re so vain’ while responding to queries with ‘You want a second opinion? You’re ugly.’

A really popular item is the iPaid upgrade. By adding this module to your iPod you’ll always be ready to answer that perennial Christmas dinner question, ‘How much did you pay for that?’

Every time you buy something you just scan the barcode into your iPaid, and the clever software divides the sticker price by three then adds another 6 percent.

That’s the magic of the algorithm. You run the risk of being caught out by some smarty-pants shopaholic relative if you claim to have paid less than retail by a simple factor of three. Watch them doing mental mathematical manipulations for hours trying to factor in the 6 percent nudge before they can call your bluff.

Gotta go, Santa waiting!