Before we went to pick up our 6 week old puppy from the shelter, we already had a name picked out. It was going to be Bart. That way I could yell at him like Homer yells at Bart on the Simpsons. But my wife didn’t think it was appropriate to name a black and white dog Bart. Only a yellow dog should be named Bart. The shelter had named him Alister.

When we got to the car to take him home, since he did not have a name, I instinctively said “Hop on in here, Hoss, we’re going home”. Hoss is what I sometimes call people when I don’t know their name. I can’t remember where I picked that habit up, but I believe it refers to Hoss Cartright from the TV show Bonanza.  “Hoss” is actually a dialectal variant pronunciation of the word “horse”. At any rate, the name stuck right away and I can’t imagine ever calling him Bart.

Our second dog got her name as my wife and I were sitting in the lobby of the Humane Society, waiting for all the paperwork on our new dog to be processed. Her tag said her name was Candy, but neither of us were feeling that. We’d been tossing names back and forth for about half an hour when my wife mentioned the name “Feffer”. This way, our dogs would be named Hasenpfeffer, or Hoss and Feffer, a reference to the Bugs Bunny cartoon Shishkabugs, or perhaps more well known as something Laverne and Shirley say in their theme song. Hasenpfeffer is actually a rabbit stew. Anyway, I loved the idea of naming her Feffer, but felt like I would get made fun of at the dog park calling for a dog of that name. Feffer is the German word for pepper so we decided to go with the English translation and just call her Pepper.

Greetings, blog reader. My name is Greg, and I am a designer here at Zoom Creates. I’d like to introduce my dogs, Hoss and Pepper, who come to work with me about three days a week. They work hard and they play hard. Actually, they sleep most of the time at the office, but manage to get up and greet their friends, the UPS man and the mail man, as well as everyone that works at Zoom.

Hoss is 5 years old going on 20, and thinks he’s human. He’s such a mellow dog that it’s hard to exercise him—we take him to the dog park and he just eats grass and visits with the humans. We were told he is a Lab/Border Collie mix, which is what he looks like, but he acts more like a lazy old basset hound. One of the reasons we picked him from his litter of six is that his tail is only about 6 inches long, and I figured that less things would get knocked off of our coffee table at home. Worked like a charm for about two and a half years.

It was then that we decided he needed a friend, someone who would keep him company.  Someone (other than me) who would chase him around the dog park to exercise him. That someone turned out to be Pepper, our other dog. Pepper is almost 3, has a purple tongue and a full size tail which took a lot of getting used to. Her tag at the Humane Society read: “Labrador mix.”  She looks like a skinny black lab with a purple tongue. Owning Pepper is like owning a real dog.

They have become honorary employees here at Zoom Creates, though they don’t have business cards. Yet.