Let’s say that among my esteemed readership is a person
named Bill Jones. Mr. Bill probably has one or more email addresses, but with a
name as common as his, I highly doubt he managed to snag billjones@gmail.com. He probably didn’t
even get billjones@hotmail.com or billjones@yahoo.com. If he were a real
tech-savvy old-timer, perhaps he secured billjones@aol.com,
I don’t know.
Like Bill, you are probably in the same boat. Unless you
have a highly unusual name, nickname, or favorite moniker (or you’re content
with using the email address provided by your regional ISP, like Cox, where the
naming land grab is much less competitive), your email is probably a messy
compromise bespattered with hyphens, periods, underscores, middle initials, the
numeral 0 in place of the letter O (sigh), and a birth date or lucky number
tacked onto the end.
Perhaps you’ve wondered what these people were like, these usurpers
of the name that was rightfully yours. Perhaps you’ve wondered how they were defiling
the email address that should have belonged to you. Well, short of writing them
and asking, you’ll probably never know the kinds of depraved activities that
your name is embroiled in.
Now let’s look at a more contemporary scenario, since email,
the original social app, is no longer very social compared to Facebook,
Twitter, etc. For example, there can only be one @czardoz on Twitter, and
thankfully, that’s me. So imagine my disappointment when I hopped onto the
Instagram train and discovered that the name “czardoz” was taken.
Not really a big deal compared to, say, human trafficking,
but did it bother me? Yeah, it did. Especially since I am an avid photographer
and post on Instagram fairly often, whereas I posted once on Twitter and then
promptly forgot about it when neither Milla Jovovich nor Britney Spears offered
a response.
But unlike email, each Instagram account comes fully loaded
with a public personality that can be stalked. And what I found on faux-czardoz’s
Instagram feed . . . I didn’t like it. In fact, it was fairly reprehensible
stuff. If you’re the squeamish type, don’t click on the following links:
1) a girl spilling her ample cleavage onto a pool table,
graced with the words “Nice Rack”
2) a dog swaddled in a Confederate flag
3) butchered pig parts, including the head
4) some guy brandishing said head in front of his face, as
if to announce “I am the pig man.”
I’m not going to delve into this person’s psyche, if only because
he seems like the type of bloke who would hunt me with a shotgun as soon as
spit on my boots. But to make a long and unfortunate story short, I’m going to
plant a warning beacon here to tell everyone that I am not this czardoz. This
is the real me:
Not the pig man. Never the pig man.
