Tuesday, August 30, 2005

What’s In A Name?

I’ve recently signed up to AOL so I now have internet access in my office at home and don’t have to keep heading downstairs to use the boy’s computer whenever I want to go online. But this turned out to be a real baptism of fire when I tried to create a user name using my own name only to discover that my name and several other variations of it were already in use.

This was quite depressing because it made me realise that I am not the only version of me. I then followed this idea to its logical conclusion and did a quick Google search on my name to discover that there are not only many more versions of me but many of them are much more successful. Bastards…

To bypass this problem I then started inventing names surrounding some of my interests such as writing, pool, comics and hapkido that I thought were quite sweet. But these also failed as they were already in use so I started using ones which were less sweet…

By doing this I discovered that fellow AOL members have already signed up to the service as Adolf Hitler and several other members of the Third Reich and most serial killers including Fred and Rose West and Peter Sutcliffe.

This would not have greatly bothered me until I hit on the name that I eventually chose (Gooleboy).

This means that people would rather be known as either members of the Nazi Party or infamous murderers rather than be named after a small town in East Yorkshire. The world’s an odd place…

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