Tom was sat in the Auto Express office one day in 2004 when one of his colleagues, Dawn Grant, told everyone that she had found the perfect grapefruit and was looking forward to having it for breakfast the next day. In fact she mentioned it more than once.
So we removed the grapefruit when she had gone home, stored in safely and set up a Hotmail account in the name of stolen grapefruit to send her ransom demands and treasure hunt clues. She saw the funny side.
Long after the grapefruit had been returned, Tom realised that he had managed to get an email address on Hotmail without having to add a long list of numbers or random characters to the name. So whenever he needed a username for anything afterwards, he used stolengrapefruit as it was always
available.
When choosing a company name, we needed something with wasn't already registered at Companies House, hadn't been domain-grabbed by speculators and was a little more interesting than just our initials. That stolen grapefruit had long term appeal.