Names

[cjsmith]

(Partially from a comment elsewhere)

My dad grew up with unusual first and middle names, and he says he "wouldn't do that to a dog." So all three kids have names as plain as can be. I know multiple other Carol Jean Smiths.

When I arrived at MIT and was introducing myself around French House, in the hopes I could take up residence there, I got the response "Your middle name is Jean, right?" This boggled me, because it was and I hadn't said so. It seems CarolYN Jean Smith lived just downstairs. My sophomore year, my phone number was removed from the student directory as an "obvious duplication." I think it was also that year that CarolYN graduated, after untangling some kind of paperwork snafu with her "phase two writing requirement".

My senior year, I phoned up to ask whether any of the upper-division electrical engineering or computer science classes I'd taken had checked off my "phase two writing requirement", and I was informed that I had completed it in my sophomore year with some kind of paper on blood clotting. Suddenly I knew what had happened to CarolYN. I said "thank you" and hung up.

Even the Army sometimes couldn't figure it out, and they're pretty good at creating systems that will work no matter who's using them. A grizzled sergeant showed up, in a room of twenty or thirty people, asking for "Smith". We asked which one. He got annoyed, looked at his paperwork, and said "C. Smith." Cindy and I asked which one. He was seriously peeved by then. How do you make sergeant without knowing Smith is a common name?

If I go into some kind of business establishment and a clerkly type asks for my last name, I know not to bother going back. They're too stupid to earn my business.

It's kind of nifty being hard to Google. Photographs of a woman in a compromising position? Why no, that's not me. Nor am I the machinery shop, the music studio, the nineteenth century portrait artist, or the Illinois fishing resort. I wonder what happened to the basketball player. He used to be on the first page of Google hits too, but I didn't find him this time.

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

My mom's twin is Carolyn Jean, named after two separate people named Caroline and Jean. Thus my firstborn girl, had I made one, would have been Caroline Jane.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I was almost Carol Jane. (My mom decided she didn't like the phrase "plain Jane", so switched to Jean.) I think Caroline Jane would be a pretty name.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

Ok, Lisa is common, I'll grant that. But Deutsch isn't as much.
There was another Lisa Deutsch who haunted me all through school. She had the same eye doctor, we went to the same ballet school for a while. Same Jr High even!
That was the weirdest. I came back from Israel in 8th grade. So I needed a locker, not having had one assigned to me in 7th. It kept not coming, and frankly lugging around my books was getting old. Then I get a note to go to the Main Office. "Lisa Deutsch meet Lisa Deutsch." Seems the Other Lisa D was getting my locker assignment and kept refusing it, as she already had a locker.
A Lisa Deutsch was also married to Tony Curtis for a while.
And as near as I can tell, We Are Not related to each other, either.
Smith IS Common. Deutsch Not to much, but still, you think we could stop running into each other.
Luckily, I do seem to be the only Lisa Deutsch Harrigan, and even Lisa Harrigan isn't as common. Weird.

[meep.livejournal.com]

I'm most of the Mary Pat Campbells that come up through googling, but I'm not the Toronto marathoner or the South Carolina Protestant minister. There was also a Mary Pat Campbell at MIT once, but that was not me, either.

Didn't have to deal with lots of other Mary Pats growing up, other than the one I was named after. That's why we name our kids either after dead people or using a middle name that no one goes by.

[nosrednayduj]

There were TWO other Judy Andersons at Stanford along with me, one with my middle name. And one when I worked for HP. My plan is to work for small companies to avoid duplication ;-) Nobody ever tried to remove me from a phone directory though!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Name duplication in companies can be almost humorous. I remember a trivia quiz at Rob's startup, Silicon Spice: "How many Marks do we have working here?" One went by a middle name and one went by a name the provenance of which I do not know, but I do remember that in a company of about fifty, the answer was seven. :-) But there were no firstname/lastname complete duplicates!

[brooksmoses]

When our company was about a dozen people, we had a Nathan Sidwell, a Nathan Myers, and a Joseph Myers. So not quite duplication, but still entertaining. At 28ish, we've still got two Nathans (though we exchanged one), two Daniels, and up until a couple of months ago had two Marks. Not to mention that Paul Brook (who goes by "pbrook" on internal IRC) got confused with me (going by "brooks") regularly for the first half-year or so that I was here....

The secret is revealed

[lrc.livejournal.com]

I have long wondered what "CJ" stood for.

Colen is a rather unusual name. My grandfather changed it from Cohen because he kept losing business when people couldn't find him in the NYC phone book. Colon is a bit more common, though most people know Christopher Colon as Christopher Columbus.

I was surprised to find out that there was another Colen at UC Davis when I went there. It turned out he was even a friend of a friend. Doing a web search has even turned up another "Larry Colen" (http://www.colenplasticsurgery.com/plasticsurgery/drcolen.html), but I'm pretty certain that he's not Lawrence Richard Colen.

Re: The secret is revealed

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

Out here in New Mexico, Colon has an accent over the second O...and it's fairly common. But indeed, Colen is not!

Re: The secret is revealed

[lrc.livejournal.com]

You're right, I was debating spelling it Colo'n but just skipped the accent.

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

Re: Googling someone. I'm sure my relatives and distant friends were a bit stunned to see my FIRST link on Google as a 1999 Peel Off interview with a dancer in San Diego that runs around nekkid. It was there as first blip for a good while.

I like keeping up with the other Bill Eylers of the world. Eyler is unusual on this side of the country, but not in Maryland. The other Bill Eylers I've found are computer graphics and animation specialists, motocross enthusiasts, military paratroopers, university professors...all things I'm not. Nor are any of them square dance callers.

Danny's last name is Lee. Either people think he's Danny-Lee (like Bobby-Ray or Billy-Bob) or that he's Chinese. He's not Dan or Daniel; Danny is his birth name. But I dare not reveal his middle name under penalty of torture!

At least I know what the CJ stands for now!

[sfleatherbear.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, Michael Levy is also very common. There was a professor at my university by the same name and I kept getting his mail in my PO Box (hence the invitation to join AARP at age 19). When I lived in Long Beach, CA there was a Michael Levy Gallery and I frequently received calls on their behalf, including a lovely 15 minute conversation with a total stranger before we realized we were not speaking to the person we believed was on the other end of the line.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've gotten AARP mail too. The phone call you mentioned must have been surreal!

I don't know why your phone call story reminds me of this, but once I was home sick for a couple of weeks and I took a call for my sister. I spoke in a harsh whisper because that's all I could do. After a couple of minutes my sister's friend whispered "Why are we whispering?" I replied "Because we have laryngitis," and she gave a full-voiced "Ohhhh!" :)

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

Hi, Michael! Welcome home!

Did you hear where GALA2012 will be?

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

So I was inspired to Google myself, as I haven't in a while. (It's always all me. There are a lot of unrelated sites that contain my first name and my last name attached to two different people, but never yet someone else with both of them.)

And I've been cited in a, um, I'm not sure what this is (http://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/subsites/gmulawreview/files/15-2/3_HAGGLUND.pdf). Some kind of law paper? Wacky.

[brooksmoses]

Yeah; the abbreviation at the top expands to George Mason Law Review. The main scholarly publication mechanism in the legal field seems to be "law review" journals, which are largely run by upper-level law students. Given timing, my guess is that this was related to the author's doctoral thesis (the J.D. one, not the Ph.D. one, I mean), and just took a couple of years for him to write it up and get it through the publication process.

Also, that's a pretty impressive set of degrees that the author has, there.

I think that, aside from being a source for foundation material for more articles, these articles also sometimes end up being read by judges who are attempting to decide a difficult case, or by lawyers who are formulating arguments; in the best case, they'll even be cited by the judge in their decision (though I gather that's somewhat rare).

It is rather entertaining that they ended up picking your website for that, though!

Common as dirt

[airporter.livejournal.com]

Go ahead, google my name(s). They're all so common that you'll never find me!

Still, it's amazing the number of notables who share "William Robert Martin" or some derivation of it.

None of them are me. :)

[recordersmith.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember, the summer you stayed at MIT and I was at home, that all my mail got forwarded to your summer dorm and from there you had to forward it to me in NY.

..and after you moved to CA, manually forwarding all your mail, since telling the post office you had moved would have resulted in all my mail going to CA...

:-)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, I'd forgotten that, but yes, wasn't that a joy? :-)

What WAS the title of that blood clotting paper, anyway?

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

I stayed in a dorm once where they'd assigned the rooms alphabetically. This meant that the two Jennifer Smiths were roommates. I hate to think how often they must've had to open each other's mail.

[eichin.livejournal.com]

Actually, MIT eventually figured out that the sane thing to do was to put arriving frosh with matching names in the same temporary rooms - the theory being something like "this is going to give you trouble for four years - get started figuring it out now" :-)

[brooksmoses]

Heh. Well, there's at least the fact that when they inevitably end up opening each other's mail (as they may well anyway), they can find each other easily to deliver it properly....

[ken_r]

If Google hasn't got 'em, where are the photographs of you in compromising positions? ;-)

[mapache]

Whereas I, on the other hand, am pretty sure that I have a unique name in the entirety of human history. Even just looking for things by hyphenated last name never turns up anyone other than my brother and I. (And since we share the same birthday, albeit four years apart, that means we have a case of last name and birthday being synonymous.)

[brooksmoses]

Mine may well be unique as well, though I have far less certainty.

Oddly enough, though, much of Tennessee was settled by a fellow named Moses Brooks.

[jupiter29.livejournal.com]

Hey, now I know your name. Cool. :) A few months back, I remember creating my facebook account so that I could play Scrabble with my three friends. And after using it for a week or so I decided to search for people I knew. I ended up going through my livejournal friends list to see if there was anybody whose real name I knew, and they were few and far between. Yours seemed obvious until I actually went to type it in and realized I had no idea what it stood for. I had Claudia in my head, but maybe that was a West Wing flashback. :)

People mess up names no matter what you do, I think. Brian Jay should be the easiest name in the world. Short, easy to spell, impossible to mispronounce. Perfect. Except that I have the following conversation easily 90% of the time I tell somebody my name:

Clerk: Could I have your name, please?
Me: Brian Jay
Clerk: *silence*
Me: *silence*
Clerk: *silence*
Me: J-A-Y
Clerk: Thank you.

Without fail, everybody always thinks I am starting to spell my name and they just wait. Every time. For my entire life. This post notwithstanding, I deeply envy your name for being short and easy to spell and clearly a name. :)

Hmm, what do I have to search on to find this woman in the compromising position. Sounds promising. ;)

[brooksmoses]

Mine confuses people similar but inverse ways; they tend to think I'm starting with a last name. And then they can't spell my actual last name.

Thus, I pretty much default to giving my name as "First name is Brooks, last name is Moses, M-O-S-E-S." That might work for you, too....

[jupiter29.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've adapted to just spell it out of habit by this time. It just annoys me sometimes that I constantly have to spell a name that is three letters long.