I’ve already mentioned that I use my middle name instead of my first name. And I’ve already described my first summer job at an amusement park where the personnel department printed up my nametag so that it said “Thomas,??? because that was my name on the employment form, and they weren’t going to use any nicknames on official company name tags. But the same sort of thing happened when I went away for my freshman year at college.

Loma Linda University was, and probably still is, a small Seventh Day Adventist college with a stunning reputation for medicine. At the time I was convinced that I’d be a magnificent neurosurgeon. It took almost all of my freshman year to realize that this probably wasn’t the best career path for me. Actually, by spring I had decided that medicine wasn’t the safest career for me. Some time in between setting fire to my lab station during the Chemistry midterm and having that sit down meeting with my Biology counselor, who informed me that whilst I was great at text book knowledge my lab technique was positively dangerous, I decided that perhaps it might be safer for the American public if I sought gainful employment outside of medicine. But I digress from the subject of names.

At Loma Linda, just like the amusement park, they used my application to determine my name. They then printed my legal, first name on all the myriad forms that they felt compelled to distribute throughout the campus. I suppose this was because I was one of only 4 non-Adventists who attended the university. In an effort to be helpful, and make me feel that I fit in with the thousands of Seventh Day Adventists on campus, the university administration issued me with a kazoo. They then instructed me to blow on the kazoo if anyone, anywhere, at any time used a term that I did not understand. Everyone on the campus; students, teachers, janitors… Everyone, had been instructed that there was this new kid, who wasn’t one of the faithful, who had a kazoo, and any time he blew on the kazoo then anyone within ‘kazoo noise distance’ was supposed to rush over to him and ask him if he needed help understanding a peculiar Adventist word he’d just heard. Yup, this was a policy just guaranteed to make me feel like one of the crowd. Several times during the year the dean had me in to his office, because there hadn’t been enough kazoo soundings that quarter, and he wanted to make sure that I wasn’t feeling isolated, and different, and did I know how to work my kazoo.

Well, whenever I showed up for a new class each quarter the professor would call names, have the students raise their hands – so he could associate faces with the names – and then ask if he’d pronounced the name properly. Whenever the professor said “Thomas??? I’d respond, “That’s me.??? And the professor would say, “Is that how you’d like it pronounced? Or would you prefer Tom???? And I’d say something like, “I’d prefer my middle name sir. It’s pronounced Dow.??? And then the professor would say, “Thank you very much Thomas.??? And he’d check off my name on the list, and then move on to the next student.

Eventually I just gave up, and became resigned to the fact that the teaching staff was somehow set on calling me Thomas. On the other hand, my fellow students, perhaps because of a sort of undergraduate camaraderie, insisted upon calling me Tom. Being known by someone else’s name can have some unexpected side effects. For a while I had quite the reputation as a stuck up snob. This was because whenever someone called out my name, or what they thought was my name, from some distance away, and behind me… Well, under those circumstances I tended not to turn around and wave back. After a couple of months I made the completely fraudulent admission to a classmate that I was partially deaf, but was too embarrassed to admit it. That got me a bit more sympathy than I’d intended, but it very successfully addressed the issue of ‘Thomas is a snob who won’t wave back to me when I say Hi on the quad.’

I think that I still have my collegiate kazoo in a desk drawer somewhere.

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