We have been having a difficult time naming the new car.  Usually names come to us quite easily and really we thought this would be a done deal by now.  Zoe is our family's Chief Namer of All Pets and Important Objects.  The first name she delivered, the very first time she saw the car, and which we all agreed was an obvious good choice was: Beatrice. 

It was so simple, so right and so well done until I talked to Tim - that very night - my only other Prius-owning friend.  I told him that we had a Prius and her name was Beatrice.

He said, "No, you can't name your car that!" He was quite adamant too, because, unbelievably, his daughter Abby had christened their vehicle "Beatrice" years before when they had bought it from a French woman of the same appellation.  Apparently Abby thought that there was a rule that your car must be named after the person from whom you purchased it.  Anyway, we immediately agreed that it would be far too confusing to have two cars and one French woman all sharing the identical name, so strangely and suddenly our Prius was anonymous again.

But then, after admiring the car's verdant hue one morning, I came up with Esmeralda.  None of the kids liked it though.  They didn't get the reference to the car's exquisitly glittering green tint nor had they read the book or even seen the Disney version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame.  I was greatly disappointed because I love this character (the original Hugo which I read in High School, not the Disney version) and have always been jealous of her for having a pet goat. 

Zoe next countered with Charybdis.  She insisted that this was a very good name and was somewhat offended when I countered that it lacked a particular warmth and didn't particularly roll easily off one's tongue.  Anyway such a moniker was destined not to stick.  At all.

This whole thing is mildly reminiscent of working at Apple on the original iMac proposal.  We had pitched the translucent, blobby, all-in-one-concept to Steve with such success that he wanted a detailed prototype as soon as possible.   This meant the design team stayed up late night after endless night, coming up with what we thought were perfectly good solutions to completely impossible engineering problems; only to have Steve reject them with the words that he knew "we could do better".  Or if he felt a little less benevolent - which became more and more the case as the days went by on this particular program - he'd say "This is crap" and send us back, literally, to our drawing boards and CAD systems.  After weeks of rejection and professional humiliation, the entire team started to finally crumble from exhaustion, believing that it was not technically possible, knowing we would get fired for daring to return empty handed.  We doubted ourselves, our worth and almost everything we had thought to be good and right.  We watched what started out as such a simple, brilliant concept teeter into a total product disaster.

And then, one day, without warning or explanation or reason, it just happened.

We came upon something that we hadn't seen before.  Something new.  Something completely perfect.