Nanotech in your pants
Cute Popular Science article titled "Little Robots in Your Pants." Turns out Dockers is making pants that claim to use nanotechnology to keep themselves clean, and a PS writer called the Dockers customer support line to find out more about this revolutionary new advance in textiles technology.
On the one hand, it's a mean-spirited piece, and kind of cruel. It's quite obvious that Dockers is being hyperbolic in referring to small fibers and a Teflon coating as "nanotechnology," and it's even more obvious that the poor customer-service person on the phone doesn't know what the word means and doesn't understand why the customer is being difficult.
On the other hand, the piece is kind of funny. It would be lots funnier, to me, if the article author had called the head of marketing for Dockers, who presumably actually has some responsibility for this misuse of the term nanotechnology, and asked the same questions.
(This is also another case where customer service people should either be given real information—like "we call it nanotechnology because the fibers are really small, we know it's an exaggeration"—or should be taught to be honest—as in, "I'm sorry, I'm not really sure what 'nanotechnology' means, would you like to talk to a marketing person?")
