So I get this a lot since the Dental R.A.T.™ is an odd name. When I first was inventing the foot mouse and thinking of a name we thought of a lot (Rugrat, dental mouse, perio mouse, perio pedal) but basically the foot pedal was a foot mouse with numbers. So what do you call a large foot mouse? Ok a large mouse? A rat! And it just felt right to call it a Dental rat! Then we thought the acronym of Dental R.A.T.™ was fun, so it stands for Remote Access Terminal. Believe me, we have gotten a lot of flak over the name, several people have told us it was a horrible name. I even had a cute logo with a cute rat dentist running a computer with his feet, but marketing agencies told me to get rid of the rodent. Nobodies afraid of the computer mouse and we don’t think of it as dirty and yucky, so why is a foot mouse called a Dental R.A.T.™ a bad thing? I don’t know, anyway, the more we tossed it around we did change the logo but kept the name because we have learned that its easy to remember and people can see it just once and it sticks. Once we explain that it’s a big foot operated mouse and that’s why we call it a Dental R.A.T.™, they get that we have a sense of humor and they like it. And whats funny is several offices have named their Dental R.A.T.™s- Viola (for violet color) or Blackie, they don’t have to call it a RAT in the office if they don’t want to.
