Eircom has changed its name more times than the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince, and this week the company that brought so many Irish people such fleeting joy and then such enduring misery in the late 1990s will disappear for good to be replaced by a brand new brand name.

The big reveal is just hours away but the smart money is on the new eircom to be called, wait for it, eir.

Er, seriously?

All this palaver and all these expensive ads teasing us about a change being in the air – geddit? – just because the company is, or at least might be, dropping the com from its name?

Eir? Eir, come on, more like.

It’s far from single-syllable names with a dubious grasp of the grammatically correct use of capital letters the company was reared. It started life in 1924 as the Department of Posts and Telegraphs and then, in 1984, it separated from the Posts bit. That continued under the name An Post, leaving Telegraphs to soldier on alone as Telecom Éireann, or Bord Telecom Éireann to give it its full name.

Fast forward 15 years to the time it joined the big boys on international stock markets under the swanky new eircom banner.

That was when it first eschewed capital letters and went with a cool new font. For about 15 seconds after the newly privatised company floated, hundreds of thousands of Irish people who had been persuaded to buy a stake in the company they had actually already owned outright, as humble taxpayers, were floating on air. The share price climbed, and everyone was loaded. For about 15 seconds.

Then the share price stopped climbing and started to falling. It kept falling, and that is where the fairytale ended. People are still looking for the shirts they lost.

The phone company has been through the wringer multiple times since then. There have been six changes of ownership in the past 16 years, and it also has the dubious honour of being at the heart of the country’s biggest corporate examinership back in 2012 after it accumulated gross debts of €4.1 billion.

But everything is bright and shiny now and eir, or whatev-eir it is to be called, is doing all it can to win back our affections. As for whether the rebranding will make any difference to anyone, only time will tell.

When French became Freedom The most pointless attempt at rebranding came in the post 9/11 world when Americans, angered by France's failure to wholeheartedly endorse George Bush's war on terror, decided to drop the French from their fries in favour of Freedom. It never really caught on. And the whole notion was quietly shelved.

UPC's Like a Virgin Actually it's not like a virgin – it is a Virgin. The company formerly known as RTÉ Relay, and then Cablelink, and then UPC, will soon become Virgin Media. And the new company will be a "platform for further growth and enhanced delivery of great customer experiences". Tell that to the people who've been left waiting like characters from a Beckett play for the UPC man to arrive to fix their telly.

Hey Unilever, leave our Jif alone Apart from Freedom Fries, which is in a league of its own, can there ever have been a more infuriating renaming exercise than when the perfectly acceptable Jif turned into the entirely ridiculous Cif? It is almost 15 years since Jaunty Jif was taken off all our supermarket shelves in the dead of night and replaced by its stern and utilitarian cousin from mainland Europe. While the change may have suited the suits at Unilever who wanted to homogenise their international presence, it did nothing for Irish consumers, many of whom persist in calling the cleaning product by its rightful name. Its original name. What's that you say? It was once called Vim? Jif is itself an interloper? Well why the hell didn't we stick with Vim? That's a much cooler name.

Marathon moan When it comes to human sporting endeavour, it is hard to top a marathon. For many people, the completion of the 26-and-a-bit-mile road race is a once-in-a-lifetime achievement. It was an end-of-life achievement for poor Pheidippides, the Greek messenger who ran from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to tell his fellow citizens that the Persians had been vanquished, before expiring. In short it is a name of substance, honour and bravery. And eating the chocolate bar of the same name is imbued all with those qualities. There is no great sporting occasion called Snickers. Nor is there an enduring legend from ancient Greece about brave heroes racing from a town of that name to Athens to give news of great import. No. Snicker is fine if you're talking about a semi-suppressed, somewhat sneering laugh. It is not okay when you are talking about a bar of chocolate.