Only once did I ever work in an office with another “Brad.” At the time, I joked that he would have to go, because it was too confusing, and eventually, he did. That was over 20 years ago.
I’ve never met a person named Warthen to whom I was not related. Oh, I’ll occasionally run into the name attached to a stranger in a phone book. And there was that ballplayer Dan Warthen, who used to get his name in the paper a lot when he played for the Memphis minor league team. And that town, Warthen, Ga. — apparently derived from a branch of the family, which originally came into this country through Maryland in the 1630s.
I was as sure as you could be of anything like that that among the 6 billion or so people on the planet, I was the only “Brad Warthen.”
But Facebook changes things. There are so many people there that your sense of uniqueness may have to undergo an adjustment. Some time recently I discovered that there was another Brad Warthen. I couldn’t find out anything about him; I just saw that he was a young guy with red hair. I left it at that.
Then tonight, I got an e-mail:
Brad Warthen sent you a message on Facebook…
Subject: dude
“dude we have the same name so i know ur a bad ass”
I wrote back to him, “Obviously.” I mean, what else could I say? I didn’t want to let him down.
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Dude, I can top that. There is a lawyer with my exact full legal married name–all three names, who was admitted to practice the exact same year I was. This was revealed when I was being listed in Martindale-Hubbell Lawyer Directory. I wrote her but she never responded. Wonder why?
Given all the possible spellings for Kathryn, you have to wonder about the odds.
They call this a Google-ganger.
“Obviously” is all you came up with? You are a professional writer and a bad ass one at that.
When I worked as a contractor in Iowa, there were two Bobs working as contractors.
Bob was contracted after George and me. When the second Bob arrived, George said that having two Bobs in the office was unacceptable.
I asked the first Bob where he was from: Ohio. The second Bob was from North Dakota.
I proposed the solution of naming the first Bob, Ohio Bob, and the second Bob, Dakota Bob. Problem solved.