#1103 Cramalot

In the course of pursuing my job, I venture through the nooks and crannies of our county. So I often stumble across interesting signs and suchlike in the further reaches of the Thurston domain.
Like this self-storage place I saw. The U.S. now has 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage, more than 7 square feet for every one of our 304 million citizens. So many self-storage places mean a variety of creative and/or cute names.
The cute name I saw was a place called Cramalot.
Ouch.
Sorry, but the word Cramalot just doesn’t ring with the same soaring nobility as the word Camelot. Cram is in that family of words that evoke negative associations. Partly because cram is inexorably associated with cramp. When you cram something in, it always sounds like some discomfort is going to be involved. Those that cram their food often have cramps. When you cram for an exam, you have brain cramps. And when you cram a bunch of stuff into a small space you inevitably feel cramped.
In no sense are cramps or cramming good.
Worse still to make a play on words with that great and original heart of chivalry, song, and legend—Camelot. That’s the kind of thing that gives me a brain cramp.
The Knights of Camelot and spending the night at Cramalot have to be an entirely different experience.
Like the people... Instead of King Arthur and his entourage, you got the manager Arty. He’ll use his plastic prop Cramalot sword to slash prices. His wife Gwen will brew up a fresh urn of coffee every Wednesday while the janitor guy Lance is skulking in the back with his dragon breath, leering at her with custodial lust. The maintenance guy Merle is a wiz at fixing a balky rolling storage space door. And of course there’s Dwayne the groundskeeper, always roaring into the lot in his jacked up Charger.
Oh the joy. Oh the poetry. Oh the inspiration, of that noble legend. I can hear the song ringing from the hills.
“We eat jam and ham and spam a lot, as we store your stuff at Cramalot.”
America, ya gotta love it.