Thursday, May 08, 2008
Penny NMN?
| I am unsure if this story is really true or not. Penny loved to pull my leg. She was very good at it, and sadly, I am very gullible. One day Penny told me she actually had no middle name. The discussion came up because her email address at Mercer followed the standard format of last name, then first and middle initial. In Penny's case it was PJ. She told me she had no middle name, but because at some point she "needed" one for an email account she made up her own middle name: Jo Of course all of this discussion then turns to my middle name. Those who know me know that I never use my middle name. Very few people even know it. While Penny had no middle name, and got to choose her own. I was never given an option and have been trying to rid myself of my middle name for years. Sadly, on one piece of paper back in 1988, I put my full name, and that got mailed to Mercer. Because all of Mercer's computer systems are connected, my middle name followed me from prospective student, to undergraduate student, to graduate student, to staff, to faculty, and on to alumni. I once went to the registrars office and asked if they could simply remove my middle name, leaving only my middle initial. They replied that they would happily do that for me... once I provided them with documentation of a legal name change. The reason I wanted to get my middle name expunged was that ALL mail sent by Mercer pulls from the same database and thus prints your entire name. Since I worked in the post office off and on for several years, I could rattle of many student's middle names. I wasn't nearly as good as Nikki, my girlfriend in college who worked in the post office. She could rattle off full names and box numbers of any student. We're talking Rainman level recall. Lots of fun at parties! Because all of my campus mail had my middle name, Penny knew it. She sent out and sorted lots of mail to and from me. Growing up, the only person who ever used my first AND middle name was my mother. To this day, if you ever use my first and middle names back to back it's like a shock collar. It gets my immediate attention. Penny would pull that one out on rare occasions, just to make sure I was listening. Thankfully, Penny had other names for me. If you go way back to my early post about my nicknames many of them are from Penny. Dr. J: When I first started teaching at Mercer, I was in a "class" of about 20 new faculty members. The largest group of new faculty in Mercer history. Most of them were "freshly minted" PhD's. I learned very quickly that many PhDs and especially the newly minted PhD's are freakishly sensitive about being addressed as "Doctor." I decided right then that once I got my PhD I would never intellectually poke someone in the chest and demand they address me as Doctor. When i related this story to Penny I told her that would ruin my plan to be known as "Dr. J." She picked up on it and ran with it. I would walk into the office and she would greet me loudly as "Dr. J!!" I once had a student who was in the office at the time Penny announced my presence look at me very confused and ask "You're a doctor?" The possible sarcastic answers to that question overwhelmed me, but I settled for the simple "No." Thumper: In real life (IRL) I am actually a very shy person. I am even more so around pretty girls and beautiful women. I have difficulty looking them in the eye, or forming complete sentences. I tend to look at the ground, mumble, kick imaginary rocks, and just kind of draw circles on the ground with my toes. Penny picked up on this once, many years ago, and being the "Disneyphile" that she was, she declared that I was "twitterpated" and immediately branded me with the nickname "Thumper." Being typical Penny, she simply couldn't let it go at that. Many times Penny would find a pretty girl at a hockey game, grab my camera, and ask her if she could take a picture of her WITH ME. Thus capturing good ol Thumper on film. And to escalate matters, Penny would pretend to have "camera problem" just so she could take an extra 4 or 5 pictures, prolonging the agony. Looking back on it, though, I must admit, thanks to Penny I do have several pictures of some very pretty girls. I, of course, look like a train wreck in them. Apparently Kodak film is good enough to capture sheer panic in addition to all those lifelike colors. But more important, I think Penny may have had a master plan that has taken me years to figure out. By purposely forcing me into those awkward uncomfortable situations, she was teaching me to relax, calm down, and maybe, just maybe, not get quite as twitterpated. I'm not quite there Penny, but I am working on it. A few years later, I related the story to Natasha, who twitterpates(?) me even to this day. She then found and emailed me this picture:  |
Labels: Mercer
