I always figured my name was an easy one to remember, because everyone seemed to be able to remember it. Every party I ever went to, there was always someone available to take great delight in greeting me by name.
What's wrong with that you ask?
Nothing really, except I'm pretty sure I don't know that many people and invariably, the greeter at said party would be grinning away at me like a chesire cat, while awaiting my friendly retort, replete with mnemonic appellation, i.e. for me to remember their name.
Have you ever had to fumble out one of those tired, old and obvious responses? "Oh hi, great to see you again"... whoever you are.
Now I'm pretty sure I'm at a disadvantage, because "Ben" is about as easy as it gets: Three letters and none of them tricky. Sure, the "B" can be a little sneaky hiding away silently in such words as doubt and lamb (English spellings of course). However, as it happens, it isn't silent in "Ben" or even in "Benjamin", at least not the way I spell them.
Oh to be called Tiberius or even Mahershalalhashbaz (the longest name in the Bible, Isaiah 8:1). Then I'd certainly make a more serious effort to remember people, just so I could rush up to them at parties and greet them by name with a big grin on my face. That would sure teach them a lesson!
Anyway, the other day I decided to do a search on Google to see just how common my name was and how many other poor Ben Jones' are out there struggling through the same terrible social party afflictions that I am. As it turns out I'm as common as muck because there's an awful lot of us around.
To be precise, Google returned 10,600,000 listings for the search phrase "Ben Jones". Seriously!
Now, I've done a few searches in my time and that seemed like an awful lot of results to me. So as a point of comparison, I punched in 3 of my friend's names just to see what would happen and all of them were under 1 million results. I win; no contest, yeah for me!
Naturally, I started looking through the 10 billion or so results to see if I could find a page that was actually about me. Come on, admit it, we all do it. Beside, it's perfectly natural, as long as you don't get caught doing it!
Let's just say that I got bored pretty quickly (about 20 pages into the Google results) from looking at all the cool and impressive things the other Ben Jones' are up to, especially considering how I'm not doing any of those things. To be honest, they seem to like rubbing it in my face what with all their fancy web pages coming up so early in the Google results.
So where's the so called camaraderie I ask you, the unifying spirit between us kindred names? My advice is, don't trust anyone that has your name, because, as hard as this is to believe, not one of those Ben Jones' even mentioned me on their websites or blogs. Even worse than that, I couldn't find a single reference to me, their name buddy, on any of their fan sites either. Oh did I forget to mention that most, if not all of the other zillion Ben Jones' around seem to be famous?
Rather than wallow in my own self pity or think about how incredibly unfair the world is to people with the name Ben Jones, unless of course you happen to be one of the other 10,599,999 Ben Jones' in the world, I decided I'd be the bigger man and mention some of my more prominently achieving name sakes. Here's just a few of them and what they're known for:
- Ben Jones - American actor (nice going), politician (oh dear), playwright (back on track) and best known for his role as Cooter Davenport on the Dukes of Hazzard TV show (Ok a lost cause, let's move on).
- Ben Jones - Associate Professor of Business Management & Strategy (sounds impressive!)
- Benjamin Jones - Successful painter and artist (maybe I could get him to come out and paint my house?)
- Ben Jones - Director of Admissions and Director of Communications for the MIT Office of Admissions (can anyone say " Bureau Of Redundancy Bureau" )
- Ben Jones - Cartoonist (I like cartoons too)
- The Ben Jones 4tet - Swing and Jazz band (wow, they named a band after me!)
- Ben Jones - UK screen actor and voice over talent (I wonder if he does voices for cartoons, I like cartoons)
- Ben Jones - Novelist (bragger)
- Ben Jones - Radio DJ (Good morning, this....is Ben Jones, and now a word from our sponsor, the ever friendly toilet duck)
- Ben Jones - Won second place in a beauty pageant (Ok yes, that one was me)
Thus I urge anyone who hasn't already, to type their own name into in a search engine and see how much better everyone else is doing that has your name. Then at least I wont be the only one who feels like they're under achieving!
I guess it's perfectly clear to all of us by now; if you're going to have children and you want them to be famous, call them Ben Jones. Alternatively, if you want them to be cool, calm and collected at parties, then call them something much more difficult to remember.
Oh and one final note to any of the gazillion Ben Jones' out their reading this article, quit making me look bad!
