Ah yes! The Plan gently unfolds. My new business name Skank Media is now registered. A shame that the Office of Fair Trading has got my name wrong on the certificate — again.
Stilgherrian really is my legal name. One given name, no surname. It’s on my passport, my Medicare card and all the nasty letters I get from my bank manager. It’s pronounced like this: [Quicktime .mov] Most people call me “Stil” for short.
It’s not the name my parents gave me. It’s one I adopted when I was in my early 20s. I was, it must now be revealed, part of a nest of Dungeons and Dragons players at the University of Adelaide. One of the people I knew there coined the word “Stilgherrian” as a name for me — me personally, that is, not one of the game characters. It kind of stuck, and for various reasons I decided to adopt it legally. It doesn’t mean anything, it was just intended to “sound right”.
This category includes posts about the problems I encounter when dealing with inflexible bureaucracies and computer systems — although as you’ll see I don’t write about it very often.
I’ve decided that each weekend I’ll dig out an object or two from my more distant past and write about it. To kick things off, here’s a challenge which was originally created by the same chap who coined my name.
The text you can see in the image below (at least if you happen to be sighted) is in an unknown script. Your task is obvious, I think. The only clues you have are that it’s a quote from a book by Ursula LeGuin and it’s nothing whatsoever to do with Tolkein.
Now originally I solved this in under 2 days, without the aid of computers or amphetamines. I reckon that in The Age of the Internet you can do better. I’ll negotiate a suitable prize for the first person who posts the solution.
I can’t log into St George Bank’s Internet banking right now — presumably it’s overloaded with people like me doing their 30 June thing. So instead I’ll continue the story of moving to Westpac.
After that initial meeting, the cards and PINs and other stuff duly arrived — and as usual the cards didn’t record my name correctly. Now I’m OK with that, having only one name is more than a little unusual. And besides, I’ve never found it useful getting angry when something’s a simple mistake. After all, you want people to help you, and berating them won’t increase their chances of fixing your problem.
So I popped into the local branch to get it sorted.
The staff were friendly and helpful. And they were confident they’d made the right changes to get it fixed. But alas, yesterday one of the replacement cards arrived, and it still had me listed as “Stilgherrian Stilgherrian”. Back to the drawing board…
The test now will be to see how Westpac deal with this. Stay tuned…
The Australian Business Register, who last week had problems getting my name right, emailed me yesterday:
Your legal name now shows correctly in the Australian Business Register.
And it does.
They didn’t say why it was possible so quickly when it was impossible only seven days earlier. Maybe their programmers burnt the candle at both ends across the long weekend.
Or maybe someone just RTFM.
It’s more than 25 years since I’ve had one name, Stilgherrian. That’s plenty of time to get with the program. So from now on I’ll name the businesses and organisations who can’t get it right — starting with the Australian Business Register.
“Oh, no mate, I wasn’t Stilgherrian until after that was taken. For my student card, so that’d be… March, maybe February. Stilgherrian wasn’t until Winter Solstice…”
25 years ago today!
Daggy photo, eh? Am I scared or was I trying for cool and moody, somehow? Scared, I reckon. I was too nerdy to even know how to look moody, let alone actually achieve a significant level of floppy-haired angst. Now Stephen… now he pulls that off so well. But then he lives in Melbourne, it’s “of the place”.
Sydney doesn’t have the sandstone Victorian for a fully grey, Londonesque, Londonangstridden pout, 30% eye shadow and 70% the precisely-edited slow-motion curl of a designer black trench coat. Not with any genuine sense of ennui, anyway.
More Stilgherrian
Crikey
Delicious
Dopplr
Facebook
Flickr
LinkedIn
newmatilda.com
Patch Monday
Qik
Stilgherrian Live (Ustream)
The Drum (ABC)
Twitter
ViddlerProject TOTO
Follow my travels to Tanzania for Project TOTO. Support ActionAid Australia by making a donation.
Recent Comments