One time, a small company contacted me asking if I might like to design a cute monster for their website. I don't even remember the company, some small startup job-search service or something that hoped to compete with Monster.com (hence the request)
They liked some of these but ultimately I think they decided against a monster mascot entirely, maybe because it would've been such an obvious ripoff of the aforementioned service.
By the way Awful Hospital is back to updating