A while back I went to a Birthday Party. It was thrown by a friend who I’d met at ‘The Lab,’ where I was hired for my very first job in Data Processing. Now that was my very first job in computers, so it was quite a while ago, and the party took on something of the nature of a class reunion.

The décor was designed to be a 1950’s sock hop, and there were lots of; poodle skirts, saddle shoes, hot dogs, cake, and sundaes, but no drinks. Well, there was an eclectic selection of soda, but no alcoholic beverages. Fortunately I’d secreted a flask in my coat pocket. So I suffered little or no impact due to the tea-total nature of the soiree. Early on I began passing the flask around at my table and by the midpoint in the festivities everyone in my section of the party was having a pretty good time playing at ‘Guess how you know the person who just walked into the room.’ When we started the game I thought that I’d do pretty well, but when I added up our scores at the end of the night I discovered that I was only batting around 500. Which might be impressive in baseball, but was pretty awful when you consider that I may have gone out on dates with some of the women who I no longer recognized.

Half way through the evening I bumped into a close chum who was named Patti. Now at this point I would usually insert a lame joke that, “Her name used to be Patti, but I guess it still is Patti.??? Except… Well, her name isn’t Patti any more. Now her name is Trish. Maybe it’s actually Trisha, and she just uses Trish for short. Perhaps at some point since her mid twenties she switched to her middle name which was/is Trisha. Maybe Trisha always was her first name and at some point in High School she decided that Patti, which may or may not have been her middle name, sounded more cool. Thinking back on it I don’t suppose that I quite nailed down the exact mechanics of her mysterious name change. Anyway, in the middle of our conversation she mentioned that no one calls her Patti any more, and that her name is Trish. I said, “OK,??? and we proceeded to discuss old times. Since I very rarely use anything other than pronouns when speaking to anybody the impact of the Patti/Trish alteration was minimal.

On the drive home from the party I started thinking about names and how people use them. I have an Hispanic buddy who at one point was dating a very Anglo girl. Well, maybe he was dating her. Maybe he wanted to date her, but she’d relegated him to the status of ‘Just Friends.’ Anyway, for about a year there he wasn’t Roberto. Instead he was ‘Bob.’ I didn’t quite understand the new name business until one evening when this short, attractive brunette walked into the room and said, “Hey Bob, we better hurry up or we’ll miss the movie.??? Then the new name suddenly seemed to make sense. Eventually they broke up and he became Roberto again. Actually, I think she went kind of wacky and joined some sort of a cult, but whatever the cause of her departure both she and ‘Bob’ seemed to go away at roughly the same time.

Many years after working at ‘The Lab’ I was hired by an enormous mail order firm. At the time they were the largest catalog sales operation in the United States, and thus the known universe. Whilst there I learned a few more interesting things about names. For instance, when you reply to a mail order catalog, even if you don’t buy anything, they then own your name. Actually, they own your name and mailing address in exactly the same way that it was typed on your return address. Since they own your name, they can now rent it to someone else. However, they can only use your name the way you spelled it in your reply. So if you deliberately misspell your name, they still have to use it that way. As it was explained to me, deliberately misspelling certain names in a mailing list is a way that catalog sales businesses track who is renting their names.

I once had to cancel a credit card by writing a formal letter of complaint to the bank issuing the card. The letter included the number of the credit card which I was canceling, and the body of the letter included my name as it appeared on the credit card. Just for grins I deliberately misspelled my first name on the return address of the envelope. I didn’t have any problems canceling the card, but around six months later I started receiving junk mail addressed to Ted. My name is not, and never has been Ted. However, that was the name I used on the return address for the formal letter of complaint. And the lunatics sold my name to someone else!

Ted still gets the occasional offer to refinance his home, but now it’s mostly exciting offers for ‘singles in his area.’

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