So, for Filer we needed a sample database of customers and projects. To create a random list of 1000 customers we took our marketing database, split up the company names into words and mixed them all together and randomly appended Ltd, plc or LLP to the end.
The weird thing is that you get a list of very legitimate sounding names, for example:
Auerbach Biosciences Ltd
Mini Aircargo Ltd
Eveden Leisurewear plc
Dellstone Paul plc
Alphatasknet Psychological Ltd
Clayton Spencer Ltd
Rosjohn Edwards plc
Lennox Hess Ltd
Wishing Pharma Ltd
Brownings Faithful Ltd
Essentis South Ltd
Newage Pharmaceuticals plc
Hifi Nelson Ltd
Multimatic Searches Ltd
Primasolve Dene plc
Winchester With Ltd
Cowan Northampton plc
Dawsons English Ltd
Hopefully the names that we are using aren’t actually real company names, but I was struck by just how you read that list and go “they sound familiar” when actually it’s just a whole load of random names.
We also needed a list of fake projects, and so to do this we took a random list of (clean) English words and did the same, but the results were even weirder, this time creating what look like Haiku, viz:
Question Interest Friend
Structure Support Delicate
Whistle Violent Science
Flower Circle Curtain
Against Pencil
Orange Straight Expansion
Against Kettle
Harbour Winter Powder
I presume this is lighting up the bit of my brain (and your brain) that looks for patterns. You assume there must be some sense in it and approach it from that angle.