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"While
Your Life Is Good... I Have A Nice Long Name"
By David
Andrukonis, Arlington VA
Finalist
Flipping through our Yorktown phone directory, you will find that some of us are considerably better off than others.
The difference is not an easily memorable phone number or a simple address, but the length of our names.
Say, for the sake of argument, that there is a person named Tim Fu. Tim’s name would have a grand total of five letters, giving him a significant advantage in life over someone like me (David
Andrukonis) with fifteen letters.
As it happens, there is a person named Tim Fu, and Tim and I did a little test. Assuming that a student writes his or her name roughly ten times each school day, Tim and I calculated the time it takes each of us to write our respective names ten times.
We found that it takes me one minute to write David Andrukonis ten times and it takes Tim 27 seconds to write Tim Fu ten times.
So each day, I spend 33 more seconds writing my name than Tim does. Over the course of a week (if I write my name a few times on the weekend,) I spend 3 minutes more than Tim, and by the end of a school year, I have spent an extra two hours.
What does this mean? If Tim and I are applying for the same job position in the summer, Tim has two more hours to prepare than I have.
If we are applying to the same college, Tim has two more hours to work on his application.
If we are starting competitive bird-sitting businesses, Tim has two more hours to send flyers around (and when you are talking about bird-sitting two hours can make all the difference).
Granted, the time Mr. Fu will pick up on me will be isolated-just a few seconds at a time, and he will only be able to capitalize on it if he spends his time very wisely.
But even if Tim does nothing with his two extra hours, he will have that much more down time, making his life less stressful, which, as any good psychiatrist can tell you, still gives him a competitive edge.
(And actually, the two-hour annual time difference is a gross underestimate, as it does not include the immeasurable time I spend spelling my name out to people, or waiting while a cold-caller stumbles through the syllables.)
And there is more.
A fifteen-letter name like mine is three times more expensive than a five-letter name. A fifteen-letter name clearly requires three times the ink or three times the lead that a five-letter name does, meaning three times the pencils or three times the pens, and three times the price.
Clearly, Tim Fu has an advantage over me (although it may be said that he will have a tough time living up to the example of his dad, Ed Fu.)
But this is not the worst of it. If I am at a disadvantage, how hard must it be for people like Carolyn Sweterlitsch, Dzhamshi Rustambekov, Jennifer Rydolm-Fox, and others with even longer names.
A person named Tim Fu could have over three hours a year on these people. And what about those often forgotten people with names that contain silent letters?
These star-crosses souls will waste away writing letters that have no effect on the sound of their name!
The solution to this name-length dilemma is two-fold. First, if your name has a bunch of silent letters, what you need to do is change your name.
For example, a name like “Wright” could change to “Ryt” (perhaps we could give the left over “i” to our school president Stephen Ng, whose last name otherwise can not be pronounced.) Or a name like “Bonneville” might become “Bonavil”.
Remember, it is children that should be seen and not heard -- as far as letters go, if we cannot hear them, we have no reason to see them.
The second part of the solution belongs to people whose names are simply too long, with or without silent letters.
Too long have we, the long-named people of the world, remained quiet.
It is time to put a stop to our expensive and time-consuming life-style. We must establish a long-named union!
The union (a name for which we can vote on later, although I am kind of partial to “The Fu Fighters”) will fight for tax cuts so we can afford more pencils and pens, project extensions so we can turn in our work on time, and control of the courts so we can lengthen names that are too short.
Hi Tihmm Phoooo.
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