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The National Security Agency Christmas Tree Ornament.
“This goldtone and painted ornament features the NSA logo surrounded by delicate filigree work with five snow flakes dangling down from the main part of the ornament. The banner at the top says ‘Happy Holidays 2006’... I apologize for the quality of the pictures, but I can’t seem to get clear ones due to the glare from the shiny surfaces.”
Oh all right, since the only references I can find to this thing all stem from the same online “antique”-dealing source, and the NSA itself certainly makes no reference to it, it’s therefore a bootleg and may not even, in a reality-based sense, exist. But in that case someone thought they’d be able to make a few bob by mocking one up—and that’s weird enough for me.
Then again, I’d have trouble believing that this wallet was real if I didn't own it:
[The design is not wearing away, and the wallet is not falling apart due to cheap materials and shoddy manufacture—it is slowly self-destructing. Great gimmick.]
Kindly donated to me by a friend who can reveal their secret identity here if they wish, the wallet, along with a Ministry of Defence branded pen and baseball cap*, was given away, in a contender for “least exciting goodie bag ever”, to aspiring fast-track civil servants.
Thing is, we’ve never found any reference to these MoD items online. Perhaps they’re classified. The only workable theory for this is that one year a department within the ministry found itself with exactly the kind of budget surplus that gets your budget slashed, which gave some young Turk a chance to parade their big idea: branding! Two months later their bosses are gazing at hundreds of branded pens, wallets and—I can’t stress this enough—baseball caps, maybe idly tossing one of them from hand to hand, saying, “Whose the fuck idea was this?” The items end up being given away to applicants for the civil service and are never mentioned again, while the bright spark is sent off to be a counsellor at Deepcut.
* Pitch black, with just the MoD logo on the front, and on the back the single word: “DEFENCE”.
“This goldtone and painted ornament features the NSA logo surrounded by delicate filigree work with five snow flakes dangling down from the main part of the ornament. The banner at the top says ‘Happy Holidays 2006’... I apologize for the quality of the pictures, but I can’t seem to get clear ones due to the glare from the shiny surfaces.”
Oh all right, since the only references I can find to this thing all stem from the same online “antique”-dealing source, and the NSA itself certainly makes no reference to it, it’s therefore a bootleg and may not even, in a reality-based sense, exist. But in that case someone thought they’d be able to make a few bob by mocking one up—and that’s weird enough for me.
Then again, I’d have trouble believing that this wallet was real if I didn't own it:
[The design is not wearing away, and the wallet is not falling apart due to cheap materials and shoddy manufacture—it is slowly self-destructing. Great gimmick.]
Kindly donated to me by a friend who can reveal their secret identity here if they wish, the wallet, along with a Ministry of Defence branded pen and baseball cap*, was given away, in a contender for “least exciting goodie bag ever”, to aspiring fast-track civil servants.
Thing is, we’ve never found any reference to these MoD items online. Perhaps they’re classified. The only workable theory for this is that one year a department within the ministry found itself with exactly the kind of budget surplus that gets your budget slashed, which gave some young Turk a chance to parade their big idea: branding! Two months later their bosses are gazing at hundreds of branded pens, wallets and—I can’t stress this enough—baseball caps, maybe idly tossing one of them from hand to hand, saying, “Whose the fuck idea was this?” The items end up being given away to applicants for the civil service and are never mentioned again, while the bright spark is sent off to be a counsellor at Deepcut.
* Pitch black, with just the MoD logo on the front, and on the back the single word: “DEFENCE”.
