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Satirist Bridget Quigg Sends Up Startups With A Round Of 'Job-Title Bingo'

Chelon Lone Photography
Bridget Quigg performing her one-woman show, Techlandia.

 This story originally aired on May 7, 2016. 

Being involved in a startup can be exhausting, expensive, stressful and risky. As a result, the people involved in such ventures can often be found taking their work, and themselves, pretty seriously.

Bridget Quigg is a Seattle writer who has worked in the tech world for a decade.  She recently completed the run of her one-woman show "Techlandia," which skewers startup culture — with love. 

The show satirizes all angles of startups and their employees, including the often ridiculous sounding job titles. Quigg says one reason for the often vague and over-the-top job titles is that startup employees are usually doing a little bit of everything. So why not pick a title that sounds cool? 

One of the elements of her show is called "Job Title Guessing Game," where she creates extravagant sounding job titles for common positions. "Store manager," for example, could become "supreme ambassador for optimized sales efforts."

Bridget Quigg sat down with Sound Effect host Gabriel Spitzer to enhance a few more otherwise mundane job titles.  

A clarification: Bridget Quigg says the app she references in the audio above was actually a game of putting together two unrelated pieces of business jargon, rather than a job title generator as she recollected during the interview.

Kevin Kniestedt is a journalist, host and producer who began his career at KNKX in 2003. Over his 17 years with the station, he worked as a full time jazz host, a news host and produced the weekly show Sound Effect. Kevin has conducted or produced hundreds of interviews, has won local and national awards for newscasts and commentary.
Gabriel Spitzer is a former KNKX reporter, producer and host who covered science and health and worked on the show Sound Effect.