I started college in 2000. There were a few mobile phones in the US back then (they were much more prevalent across the Pacific at that time), mostly in cars. I still remember the giant magnetized antenna that we plopped on top of our car just in case my parents needed to make a call on the side of the road.
I didn't have a car though, nor did I have a phone. I received calls like most of the rest of my dorm on a single handset hung from the wall, and dispatched to from the school's switchboard. The phone would ring, someone would pick it up, and then shout out through the halls for whomever was supposed to answer.
Nothing weird there at all.
This set up in 2000 just so happened to overlap with the advent of loyalty programs in retailers. To this day, I reckon you could probably take the main phone number of every college and university in the US, and use it to invoke any loyalty program at a retailer that was around back in 2000. I still use my school's number from time to time, and it always works.
When I did get my first cell phone, I picked up a number in the 312 area of downtown Chicago because it was, and is cool. I will hold on to that number for all time. I do not want to share it with Krogers and Piggly-Wigglies, and I don't need to be texted thirty times a day because Facebook didn't want to pay some poor guy $10k for pestering him.
What I want instead is to use my alma mater's number for everything, and leave my cool number for my cool friends. But all those darn 'puters need me to be "me" so they send me a text for verification, and that can't go to that handset on the wall, and I don't live there anymore anyways so it doesn't work.
You are not a handle
When I was maybe twelve or thirteen I "invented" a mythology. I guess to go back even further, when I was in grammar school, I exhausted the school library's entries on mythology. Pantheons, and the stories they create have been one of my many obsessions.
My mythology was the pantheon of the Ephesians, a group I only knew existed from random bible passages since Wikipedia had not been invented yet. It included maybe twelve gods and goddesses, which fit into the sophisticated mind of a boy in the midst of puberty.
I only remember a few, like Betedoun, the Ephesian god of war. He was responsible for sending a meteor to kill the dinosaurs, because he didn't think they were cool enough iirc.
The leader of this divine group was Ramdatookisodom, Ephesian god of sexual tendencies. Before you ask, yes this name purposefully contains two not-so-veiled references to anal sex. To twelve year old Catholic me, some pagan deity tappin' everything around him was about as iconclastic as I could get. And since the Greeks' Zeus had already filled the role of banging everything that moves for procreation, I had to get a little creative.
It was right around this time that my Dad got us a Compuserve account, and I started going online. Stranger Danger being a thing even before the internet, I somehow had enough sense not to use my real name online, so when I had to identify myself, I used the name of one of my creations: Ramdatooki. How's that for dodging the vulgarity filters :tap-forehead:.
A few years later when it became time to start getting in touch with colleges, I made the grown up decision to retire Ramdatooki as my handle, and update to something more sophisticated: zkpunk @ hotmail.com.
Then gmail burst on the scene, and they nailed the false demand created by artificial constraint by keeping their service invite-only for years. Through some connections to the more 31337 parts of the internet (4chan) I was able to score an invite, and secured the coveted firstnamelastname @ gmail.com. Afaict there is only one other Zach Babb, and him and I seem to be around the same age, and we compete for signing up first for things. It's a friendly competition for me. I hope he feels the same.
Then the socials came, where it mattered who you were to some (Facebook), and to others you could be pseudonymous (Twitter and Reddit). Handles proliferated so much that services created just to link to your online personas were created and actually monetizable (according to this there are at least sixteen of these services around).
So who am I?
Ramdatooki, Zweibel (the german word for onion, but before I knew that I named myself after T. Herman Zweibel), zkpunk, zachbabb at gmail/me/mac/icloud, zach at planetine/zkbabb, CurvatureTensor, planetnineisaspaceship...?
Who are you?