This week’s Nonstarter betrays the name of the column: it’s a clever idea executed well, and has already smashed its funding target like Geoff Capes bursting through a fake brick wall. It is, however, a damning indictment of the world that made it necessary.
And I say necessary because people have grasped for it with desperate, shaking hands – this is not a flourish of technological frippery like the Notice, but the promise of refuge from the information hurricane of modern work.
The Ostrich Pillow is a soft bag you pull over your head and jam your hands into when things get weird and you need a hole to cry in. You slip it on during brief moments of workplace respite and lie face-down, looking like some sort of crap alien that is eating its own hands.
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Yet despite how defeated and weird you look from the seat next to you, you drift off to sleep with a happy smile on your face and a fading image of a rotating cake demonstrating how your power nap will make you 34 per cent more productive.*
At least, according to the adorably soporific pitch video. The reality is more likely to involve 10 minutes of anxiety with your lower face pressed against breath-moistened desktop, breathing your own stale coffee reek and enduring sleepless visions of spreadsheets like a depressive’s reworking of Tron.
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Then there is a tap on your shoulder. You flop up helplessly with your hands pressed to your bulbous grey head like Munch’s Scream, flailing to pull the damn thing off as your MD asks you when you’ll be able to send feedback on his last email.
With this product, it matters little whether the end result actually gives people their promised shelter. More impressive is the fact the makers have, quite literally, sold a dream.
* since I am not Ben Goldacre, I will simply leave this without comment and turn to the reader with raised eyebrows and mouth set in a cynical line.
Fred Crawley is group editor for asset finance & accounting at VRL Financial News.