Say My Name

You can express a certain amount of sentiment with how you store somebody's name in your phone. Years ago I was hurt to discover that my girlfriend had me in her phone as "Bolingbroke, R" – as though she wasn't even on first name terms with me. There was so much mickey taking that all my friends changed my contact details to the same thing, and I think that some of them are like that to this day.

On another occasion we were out drinking and talking about middle names. One of our friends said that she only had one middle name which was "Just Jane" but that's two names, "no, JUST Jane" Oh is it hyphenated like Mary-Sue? Anyway we've called her "JJ" since then. One of my friends was so drunk that he forgot the conversation and forgot changing her contact details and woke the next morning to discover that she was "deleted" from his phone. He assumed that they'd had such a bad argument that he never wanted to talk to her again. He was rung later that day by someone he had no recollection of but that his phone knew as "JJ".

One of my old school friends (another computer nerd) recently won an Emmy award. While he hasn't become intolerable with his own sense of smug self-satisfaction we do rather fear that he isn't going to let us forget it. We've beaten him to the punch by changing his name in all our phones to "Emmy Award Winning A**m S******d" and we call him that in the third person.

Richard "Outstanding achievement in the field of excellence" B