Member-only story
How It Feels To Have A Common Name
To All The John Smiths Out There, I Get It
I didn’t really notice when I was a kid. I never gave it a second thought until I was well into my later 20s.
That’s when the problems began.
I was at a Blockbuster video store (oh, I’m aging myself!), and the clerk told me I still had movies checked out.
No, I did not.
Don’t I live at such and such address? No, I do not.
Oh, wait! Sorry, wrong one.
Then there was this juicy one:
I get pulled over for a tail light being out, and the police officer informs me he looked me up and there’s a warrant out for my arrest. Assault and battery.
“How is that?”, I asked him. “I’ve never done anything. I have no record. I work for a lawyer.”
He studies my license and the warrant. Oh! Wrong middle name and birth date. Sorry.
Then there was a namesake in my art history class in college. The roll call was always interesting. There were maybe 45 people in that class, so I never saw what she looked like. But now I knew I had a namesake on campus that made her way into my class.
