Some Things You Can't Make Up

For many years I have been amused by the names some people are stuck with as they go through life. Some of them have names foisted upon them by their parents. Some have married into and, thus -- to some degree at least -- chosen their bizarre names.

I'm not talking things like all of the "color" names out there (you know, like the person with the last name of "Black" whose parents called her "Ebony"). I'm not even talking about the people who are not-so-subtly named after stars (like "Vanna Wright" or "Rhett Coutler"). I'm just talking about the names which are too ridiculous to be real.

When I lived in Baltimore, I worked in a box office with a broad range of names that came and went. There was the little tiny woman whose name was bigger than she was (Mrs. Walter Winkenwerder). Or the woman whose name really should have been part of a super hero novel (Lois Lee Speed -- don't you just know she'd be married to someone like The Flash?).

In my current job one of my tasks is to put together a bunch of documents to send off to the distributor. Most of the time, I just bundle them up with the first word of the book as the tag. So I get to email off things like "Battle Covers" or "Beginning Documents" or, one of my recent favorites, "Wretched Marketing Plan."

But, today, as I was working on those files, I got the best of both worlds. I got to write an email saying "I need a Marketing Plan for DeKok." Yes. I know it's juvenile and silly, but it made me laugh.

Oh. And have I mentioned that the first name of that author is Joy?

Yeah. You can't make some things up.