Mmm, our own dog food.

“I got these and I’m surprised how nice it sounds with them separated out to the front corners of my desk,” quoth some guy named Dave the last time we sold these. “The 5 foot cable is pretty handy.” (He’s talking about the cable between these two pills of condensed aural power, so you can get a nice stereo spread going on.)

You may recognize this Dave person as one of the high muckety-mucks of this operation since our embryonic Woot days. In biz-speak, personally using your own product is called “eating your own dog food.” If this be dog food, it’s not the dry pebbles of desiccated meat cereal. This is the moist, chunky stuff that flows out of the can in recognizable pieces of steak, the kind where the commercial actually makes you hungry for a second, before your guts reassert the inviolable barrier between animal food and human food.

We aim to be as frank as Charlemagne about the pros and minuses of everything we sell. We generally find out how they really perform about the same time you do: when you get them home and start using them. But we do have more awareness of the range of crap out there than the average Joe Googler. And we can usually take our stuff out for a test-drive at the office. So when we staffers spend our own money on something for ourselves (employee discount? what’s that?), take it as the most informed possible endorsement.

Our brilliant copywriting for this one got Dave’s canine palate salivating for some ultra-compact, loud USB/portable speakers with a long battery life and aux-in, Bluetooth not necessary. That’s exactly what he wound up chowing down on. This whole metaphor is way more disgustingly vivid than it needs to be, but suffice it to say Dave didn’t go digging up any dead birds that day.