I made a decision about this blog of utterly minimal consequence, which is actually the reversal of a decision that I don’t think that anyone actually noticed. But it’s related to the history of my online nickname, so I’ll share a bit about that.

All of you have probably figured out that “Trumwill” is the first four letters of my last name followed by the first four letters of my first name. The name was derived from the account naming convention of a former employer wherein they did the same. The formulized account name became so prevalent in everything we did and the office environment itself was so cold and impersonalized that when it was pronounceable we called each other by our account names rather than our real names.

When I started this blog, a lot of it involved talking about work. The email addresses and account names at Falstaff, where I was working at the time were our first name followed by our last initial. Most of the accounts I’ve had were my first initial followed by my last name. Sometimes my first two initials. Once it was like “Trumwill” except it went 6-2 rather than 4-4. I was initially going to go with WillT (and I do use that sometimes), but I came to the odd decision that if someone from my work saw that naming convention it might be familiar or something, so I explored alternatives. wtruman and trumanwi were both lame, but trumwill was perfectly pronounceable and even if no one knew precisely where it came from it was indicative to me of corporate absurdity in a blog about (at the time) corporate absurdity. So “trumwill” it was.

So that brings me to the current decision. At the former employer, our account names were never capitalized. So for this blog, I almost never capitalized my name. Everyone else did, but I didn’t. Even in blog post titles. The idea in my mind was that it harkened back to the former job with the former company. I’ve since come to the conclusion that it is more easily interpreted as lame like a black-clad teenager that things that never capitalizing anything or capitalizing sporadically is kewl like ee cummings or some crap like that.

So despite its origins (which are largely irrelevant and will be made moreso as it’s unlikely that I will get into the grit of my current work since it’s all so bloody obvious who it’s with), Trumwill is now officially capitalized.


Category: Office, Server Room

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2 Responses to The Origins of Trumwill

  1. logtar says:

    Yay for capital T

  2. Barry says:

    Man, I’m glad you got that off your chest. I can tell it was burning a hole in your soul for a good while, now 😉

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