nathan....My Name is ShanmuHAnathan

Yipee! Google has recognized my blog - this is such an important event, that I have rewritten this post, pushing the news about that unfortunate piece of software which would have become famous for being the most short-lived installation on my PC.

Thanks Amma, Appa, for naming me,rather, spelling me Shanmuhanathan - with a 'ha' between 'mu' and 'na'. All the search engines point to me and just me, when someone searches for Shanmuhanathan (ignoring askjeeves' lone different entry).

This was such a pain when I was a student - had to keep on repeating, like a parakeet, "thats ShanmuHAnathan..no..no..no.. not shanmuGA.. (not shanmuGHA, not shanmuKHA, not shanmuKA)...its shanmuHA with just a H" to all those people who took on the Herculean task of trying to spell/write my name. Believe me, there were quite a few people who wanted to write my name, because of my prowess in that arcane art of Quizzing. Whenever I attended Quiz Contests, my desire to win them matched the pain of getting the certificate with the correct spelling, after that. As they say, "No Pain. No Gain."

That doesnot mean that once I quit being a student, people found my name easier to spell - just that I got used to wearing my company ID tag around my neck and whenever somebody tries to spell my name, I just stop them midway and shove my ID card (which, wonderfully, has the correct spelling) into their face. Considering the fact that the number of people of wanting to spell my name decreased, (due to my ignoring the Quizzing part of my life, after joining the big Corporation to work) it did get spelt, worse still, pronounced wrongly at my workplace. This forced me to the drastic measure of calling myself Shanmu - to prevent all those non-south-indian tougues from going into a palsy.

That didnot prevent the nameboard contractor to our company to spell my name according to his whims:
When I was a newbie, I used lust at all those glossy plastic nameboards stuck over other senior employees' cubicles - 'Mera number kab aayega?' was the biggest question. After my training, I was put into a seat between 2 proper cubicles - making it uncomfortable for all the three of us. To my utmost disppointment, there was no holder to stick my nameboard into. Had to console myself with a printout, which I composed, with the correct spelling. People were so impressed with my compositing skills that they froze ordering new nameboards and I was beseiged with requests regarding how I had taken such a authentic-nameboard-standards-compliant printout as my nameboard!

Then, that wonderful day came, when we moved into our new building and I skillfully hid my printout and left my nameboard holder blank. Senior Management must have went into a tizzy to know the name of that harworking guy who stays 24X7 in office - My ruse worked and they started ordering nameboards again. So, with great glee and anticipation, went to the reception and demanded my nameboard. The conversation went something like -
"Can you give me my nameboard...", demanded me with uncontrolled anticipation.
"Your Name please...", asked the receptionist.
"Shanmu...er..Shanmuhanathan T", said me with confusion.
"Sorry, I can't find any Sanmukhanadhan here", chirped back the receptionist.
"er...its Shanmuhanathan", with my BP increasing and my hand automatically displaying the ID.
"Did you request for it?, Sir", came back the receptionist.
"Oh..OK..where do I request for it?", crestfallen me.
"Please send a request to the admin department,Sir, It would be delivered to your workplace within a week".
So I came to my computer, composed a nice email to the admin guys, taking care to spell my name properly as "Shanmuhanathan T". Just like those half crazy fans of the superstar awaiting his next release, I marked the one week eagerly on all the calendars I could get my hands on (including the ones in Outlook and Mozilla). After that one week, when I came to my workplace, to my horror saw that it had been given to some guy called "S Thiagaraja". Reality dawned on me slowly: I was shanmuhanathan.thiagaraja in the company records and either the admin guys or the contractor decided to save on the plastic and shorten my name to "S Thiagaraja".

--interlude--
S.Thiagaraja is my father you see.As a part of the joining formalities, We were forced to give a second name by the HR. We freshers with our feet barely touching the ground (were on cloud 9), obeyed all the instructions given and faithfully expanded our initials. My roomies Kitcha and Venky became krishnamoothy.sethuraman and venkatesan.rajasekaran, respectively.
--/interlude--

After much threatening, the contractor agreed to have it corrected and promptly returned it with 'Shanmukhanathan T'. I was forced to 'escalate' the issue to the contractor manager. He came down to my desk and said in that comforting voice, "Son! These things do happen. What you have to do is give me a proper spelling of your name and I will ensure that this mess is cleaned up". He was talking as if all this mess was because of my mistake. I was ready to forgive and forget everything, provided my nameboard came back to me with my spelling. So I dug out my precious prinout and gave it off to the contractor and Voila! The guy was true to his word and my nameboard now sits proudly in my cubicle, proclaiming that a unique person is working here. Still, all those non-southIndian Newbies coming to my desk are bowled clean, when they try to prononce my name...I smile and say, "Call me Shanmu, Kid!". This does remind me of the travails-of-single-south-indian-men, by Sidin.

Coming to the would-have-been-headline part of this post:
Record Break
I have uninstalled Thunderbird and Firefox and have moved to Mozilla 1.7. So Thunderbird has the dubious record of being the most shortlived installation on my PC. since I was using a Mozilla based mail client and a mozilla based browser, it seemed foolish to have more memory used for the two of them separately - Mozilla 1.7 provides me a similar browser and mail client with a much smaller memory foot print.

PS. All those who think my ego is superinflated - reconsider! I didnot pepper my post with all the links to the search engines, searching for me. Here they are:
MSN
Yahoo
Ask Jeeves - The second hit is not me.
Lycos
HotBot
Nicely consolidated at the end of my post!

Bye for now!