I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

I don’t have a nickname at the moment.

It’s actually been a while since I’ve had one.

I’ve always appreciated them when I did have them.

Here is a history of my nicknames.

In college I was Fight.

It started when I pledged a fraternity.

Now that you’ve all wiped up the liquid you just spit across the room.

Yes. I was in a fraternity.

I attended a very small. Very conservative college. And if you wanted to have fun on campus you joined a fraternity or sorority. By the time I graduated most of my friends were in frats or sororities.

It was also not very expensive to do so.

It was a couple of hundred bucks in dues. You room and board for the college paid for you to live in the frat house. And to be honest. It was a lot of fun.

It’s the only thing I will ever have in common with Mitch McConnell. Same frat. Different colleges. Different political beliefs.

My fraternity brothers started calling me Fight when I pledged, and it continued till I graduated.

I loved it and it was the name on all of my fraternity gear.

Then I moved to Atlanta and became Jeff Ann.

It started when another server named Clay Boye got hired. He was quirky and weird, in all the best ways.

He was a visual artist and is the person who told me that if you buy your art to match your sofa, you should hang your sofa on the wall and sit on the floor.

Buy ART that speaks to you.

He was called Clay Boye and he started calling me Jeff Ann. It stuck. And I was Jeff Ann until I moved back to Kentucky.

When I moved back to Kentucky, I went to grad school at the University of Kentucky, getting an MA in theater.

One day, my design professor and I were in the the McDonald’s drive through and I saw a friend from work. I rolled down the window and said hello to Lisa Larmour and she said What’s up Maddog?”

It stuck.

No one had ever called me that before.

But from that moment, everyone called me Maddog.

When I went to the department graduation, the chair of the department called me Maddog.

PS. Lisa would have had no idea, that it ever happened and that the name stuck.

When I left Kentucky to go to NYC, the Maddog name was lost in the move.

I haven’t really had a nickname since.

I do sometimes add Anne to the name of the person I’m talking to at work. Less so now, but when I started managing I did it all the time. Kimberly Ann. Laura Ann. Brian Ann. So, there are a few people called it back to me calling me Jeff Ann.

It does make me smile when someone from my pasts calls me by a nickname.