Otto is a pretty great name, that’s for sure. It’s a palindrome, for one thing, so it looks good coming or going. It’s spelled with only two different letters, which makes it super fast and easy to type, and it looks like an emoticon for a hot-rod funny car or the human foot. Six Nobel Prize winners were named Otto, and two more had it as a middle name. That has to be a record, but we’re not going to look it up.

The name “Otto” on almost anything is probably enough to get us to buy it. Like these gamer headsets—we didn’t know anything about their neodymium speakers and the sweet bass response they give you. We gave no thought to their noise-canceling microphone, which filters out background noise to improve voice recognition. Nah, we were just like “Otto! That’s an awesome name. Let’s either buy a bunch of these or else get a dog who can live at the office and call him ‘Otto.’”

And then like four people on staff turned out to have crippling cynophobia, so we got the headphones. Good thing they’re reasonably nice, or we’d be stuck with them permanently, like we were with the Barton Gomez brand scented candles we bought. They turned out to be toxic when burned. But “Barton Gomez,” isn’t that a cool name?

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