Original Commentary
Too bad Ms Taylor just didn't play along... she might have been able to sign Brisbane up on an installment plan for something he wasn't sure of... I suppose Kimberly got her business skills from the other side of the family.

Modern Commentary
"What does Lemon Technology do?" was one of our frequently asked questions, both before and after this comic. Brisbane doesn't work with anything customer-facing. At this point, he's just a general lackey and mail guy. The sales department and delivery department are mostly separate fiefdoms that he barely interacts with. - Terrence

Original Commentary
You'd be surprised how successful the industrial fragrance market is- people just don't like the smell of people very much.

Modern Commentary
Why fragrance compounds?
Firstly, I used to do tech support on behalf of IBM. I'd ask our corporate customers to tell me about what their company did and sometimes it'd be really interesting. Like the company that sold titanium dioxide.
Titanium dioxide is a food-safe white pigment. Among other things, its the "m" on a M&M. And it's in sunscreen and toothpaste. I found that fascinating and loved the idea of the components that existed in the background of society but rarely entered active thought. The kind of products that make up the subconscious of our daily lives.
But also, I was reading something where the main characters jobs were so very famous and important and glamorous. I wanted to do the exact opposite. I can't recall what I was reading; it was more likely to be the cumulative effect of dozens of works that did that than one specific thing. But I wanted to do the opposite of that.
Also, it ties in with the "Lemon" in the company name. - Terrence

Original Commentary
Hmm... maybe Kimberly did learn a thing or two from her mother... and just who is Constance, you ask? Ms. Taylor, of course.

Modern Commentary
So, who was that mysterious offscreen man who's on a first-name basis with Ms Taylor? Surely if it were just business, he's call her "Ms. Taylor".
No idea. Sometimes we have elaborate plans and figure out things in advance. Sometimes we just pass plot tokens along to our future selves in the hopes that they'll be clever enough to figure out how to use them.
But the important takeaway is that she has an active social life and that some of it may occur during business hours.- Terrence

Original Commentary
For Kimberly, it's not the thought of her mom having a date that scares her. It's the thought of Ms. Taylor's date being younger than Kimberly that does.

Modern Commentary
So, seriously, who was it? Who does Brisbane even know that isn't from the theatre?
We might have been thinking about setting up Mr. Taylor here, but decided not to debut him until year three. That would explain how he might look familiar; Brisbane might have seen him in photos or just through family resemblance to Kimberly.
Or it could've just been some random guy that she was seeing casually, and Brisbane was mistaken about having seen him before. - Terrence

Original Commentary
Like mother, like daughter...

Modern Commentary
I mean, theoretically Kimberly could've tried selling computers to the other people who live at the apartment building. Not Lola; if this was her idea, she had a computer already. Not the lounge guys. But maybe one of the other tenants who we never see.
I've mentioned the shortcomings of the comic's font before. Another of them is that it did not have a percentage sign. The one in this comic (and two comics before) was from Arial. A decade later, we edited the font to include this percentage symbol just because it was a real hassle switching between fonts.
I've been trying to find out if Blambot and Comicraft - where we get our fonts these days - were around and selling to consumers then. But the Spare Parts font - Blambot's Oh Crap - just wasn't the right choice for this comic.-

Edit: This is the new font. After I wrote this, I decided to switch things over, for the reasons above and more. - Terrence