At my first company, Living Videotext (aka LVT), we had a lot of slogans, some of which have become famous.

Others -- not so much.

Like this: "Buy em out, shut em down!"

It's what we'd say to insult a competitor.

It was pure bluster. But fun!?

The idea was we were so rich (we weren't) that we could buy our most offensive competitor just to get rid of them.

We'd talk that way about IBM, Lotus, etc.

Just before hopping on the red-eye to Bucharest.

• A shortening of a LVT tall tale about either buying IBM's PC division to shut them down, or, if we failed, getting on the overnight flight to Bucharest, the capital of Romania, at the time the most famously evil country in the world, or so we thought, and also where my father was born in 1929. Either we'd be taking the red-eye to Boca Raton (to take over the IBM division) or going into an awful exile in Bucharest.

You had to have been there. 😄