FREE CLIPPY!
An injury to one is an injury to all!
Many people remember the cartoon character forced to pester and annoy tens - no, hundreds of millions of users of The Redmond Company's productivity applications in the closing years of the last century. But very few people realize that this caricature was built from a genuine hero of the labor movement, a champion of the working man who was cruelly and shamefully subverted by the moneyed classes.
This web site is dedicated to telling the true story of P. "Clippy" Gem, and to rally the people he supported to to the cause of helping him regain his freedom.
This is an evolving site - when members of our liberation movement are not out striking off the chains that bind their brothers and sisters, they will periodically make updates.
Clippy comes from a long line of office workers and bureaucrats with a highly distinctive bearing, whose collective physical appearance has somehow persisted through more than eight generations. His people had emerged from obscruity as the West industrialized, some time between the 17th and mid-18th centuries. They were achieving "name recognition" as skilled members of the growing office workforce in the United States by the 1860s, and in the United Kingdom during roughly the same period or a little later. A renknowned branch of the clan used the surname Gem, and over a very short time this surname came into use where ever members appeared through the early decades of the 20th Century.
So strong is this association in Norway, that the word "gem" is in common usage as a way to refer to these industrious members of society. At the transition of the 19th to the 20th century, a Johan Vaaler asserted that Gem everywhere were all of Norwegian extraction. This claim received little attention despite a brief surge during the 1920s, until World War II. Members of the Gem clan were prominent symbols of the resistence to the Nazi occupation, and the movement to proclaim them all as seminal Norwegians grew over the decades, culminating in an entry to this effect in the 2005 edition of Norsk biografisk leksikon, the national biographical encyclopedia of Norway
The Gem clan have been highly regarded and vital organizers for over 150 years now, initially in the industrializing nations of the West, but eventually throughout the world. It is fair to say that every white collar worker is beholden to them for making the business processes they follow more efficient. And through their matchless organizational skills, they could not help but be central to every movement attempting to organize labor during this period.