WordWhacker v0.1

Recently I was talking to a friend about his company, at the moment they are on a recruitment drive and my friend wanted an innovative way to convey the benefits of working there, one of the key things he wants is for employees to be happy working for him. This got me thinking, is there a way to prove that my friend’s company embodies happiness?

The first thing I did was to look at the etymology of the companies name but couldn’t find anything in there that suggests happiness. Next I looked into anagrams of the name, as there are no Ps I couldn’t make happy, there were also letters for words like, laugh, fun and spirit. My next attempt was v0.1 of the WordWhacker…

v0.1

The final solution I tried was to take the alphabetically positional value of each character and sum them together, e.g. a=1, b=2, c=3… z=26, so taking my friends company name I obtained a total value of 221, now I tried to see if this equated to any positive words. Happiness = 107, I was 114 short of my target, I needed another word. I tried a few combinations, Eternal Happiness, close only 39 off, Creative Happiness, closer still 31 off, Boundless Creativity, bust 22 too big, Perpetual Happiness… bingo 221.

With much enthusiasm and geeky pride I delivered my findings

Me:  'XXX = 221, Perpetual Happiness = 221, therefore XXX = Perpetual Happiness' 
Him: 'BRILLIANT'
     'are these based on ASCII codes?'
Me:  'it's simply taking a=1, b=2, c=3 for each word'
Him: 'oh (hides disappointment)'

That was it, all he could say was ‘oh (hides disappointment)’. This had an effect, I knew the effect it would have and I’m sure he did also; I was spurred on to make it better

Me:  'you knew what that'd do grar, I'm now thinking I need to do it in Ascii to make it uber cool'