The Story of Lil' Brad: Origins

Lil' Brad's story began at my day job working in tech support at a large financial software company.  For those of you who don't work in Corporate Amerika, there are lots of conference calls.  My team had a daily call with our "partner site", which is a polite way of saying a call center we paid to deal with the unpleasant task of actually talking to our customers.

Anyway, as one of the leads on the team, I would frequently ask questions of our call center agents during these calls.  Many times the response to my questions was.. dead air, crickets, nada.

So to make the situation less awkward (or more maybe) when no one would answer, I started answering my own questions in a high-pitched, obviously fake voice "Yes, that's right Bob", "I completely agree Bob!", "We'll get right on that, Bob", etc.

Over time, the high-pitched voice morphed into a loose impersonation of our CEO, who was named Brad and had a noticeable Southern accent, that I of course greatly exaggerated to comic effect.  My team started calling this character "Lil' Brad".  As the joke became part of our daily patter, it evolved that Lil' Brad was a ventriloquist dummy that I forced to say these agreeable statements.  

Lil' Brad became frustrated with his limited duties as my "yes man", and began acting out: he would berate my co-workers for their poor performance, stupid or incorrect answers, and generally make trouble at opportune moments in the daily call.

After months of this joking around, I decided we needed a "real" Lil' Brad ventriloquist doll to take the gag to the next level.  The search for a suitable dummy began.














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