My very good friend m@ has a really cool way of spelling his name. See, I did it there: “m@”. Frankly I’m jealous.
So I started to think about what I could be called that would reduce to a pithy few characters. “Chris” doesn’t really shrink all that well. “Crz”? No, I sound like half a dodgy Czecholovakian wine. “Chris 2.0”? No, that’s been done. “Chris 2007”? No, I’ll be obselete in less than a year.
And then it hit me like a Volvo through the frontal cortex: Th_ – Thunderscore!. M@ liked it, and the ensuing conversation went like this.
m@
Wow, that’s a goodun. It even rolls off the fingers nicely.
So that’s it then. You’re Th_ from now on.
Th_
Excellent. I feel like a character from an obscure 80s kids cartoon series.
m@
Get yourself a nice lycra jumpsuit with external underpants, and whenever you see a sign high in the night sky, code, code like you’ve never coded, code to Save the World!
Th_
I can see it now:
“What’th that up there, Mummy?” (he has a lithp)
“Why that, little Jimmy, is Thunderscore.”
“Who ith he mummy?”
“He’s the man who saved us from Microsoft.”
“What a hero. When I grow up I with I could be jutht like him.”
“Maybe you will, little Jimmy, if you learn your regular expressions.”
m@
Which is exactly why I’ll never be a thuperhero. Goddamned regular expressions.
And yes, before you ask, that is pretty typical of our conversations.