trickykitty | Software Title

Hi, My name is Nicole.

I have always gone by Nicole. For the longest time only my sister called me something other than Nicole on a regular basis (Nic).

I have a lot of nicknames:
Nikki, Nic, Nickel, Nickelodeon, Nikolai, Nicholas, Nike, St. Nick, Nicodemus, Nickers

However, these have only ever really been used as spare nicknames, and I've found that people tend to pick a certain nickname convention and stick to it. Eileen calls me Nickers. D at work calls me Nicodemus. The IT guy I worked with at the YMCA always sung, "Oh, Nikki, you're so fine. You're so fine you blow my mind," every single time he first saw me or when I would answer the phone. An ex-boyfriend was the only one to ever regularly call me Nikki, unless he was pissed off at me, in which case he went full-blown Nicole, kind of like an angry parent - it always made me giggle when he did that. He thoroughly liked the fact that he had a nickname for me that no one else used, and therefore it was said more as a term of endearment. I tend to like my nicknames when people use them regularly.

Now back in the early 90's when ICQ was the popular IM of the day, it was drilled into our heads not to use our real names online. I never could think of a "good" other name that I felt comfortable with, so I went with Nikki. It allowed me to think of myself as a more social, playful creature while online, thereby helping me get over the shyness that I had back in high school days. It was my online persona, and she was quite the flirty type.

The spelling comes from a friend of mine in junior high named Nikkol*. She always went by Nikki, and I always went by Nicole, except for those few times when we were together and other friends would refer to us as Nikki-squared.

Fast forward many years later, and I'm dating

smokedamage** who introduced me to LJ and twisted my arm to sign up for a blog. Seeing as how I really didn't get the point of blogs to begin with, and figuring that I would rarely post, if ever, I decided to again go with my typical online convention of using the name Nikki for the profile page.

Then I started meeting other IRL people that had LJs. I started friending them, they saw that my name attached to my LJ was Nikki, and they started calling me that. Those friends introduced me to other friends, etc., until I have this one huge happy family of friends now - all calling me Nikki. It was still fun and playful, and I still went by Nicole at home, with my family***, and at work. That is, until

the_paco got me a job at our current place, and introduced me to the owner as Nikki. It stuck. There was a period of time in there that I really had to think about how to introduce myself to new people. I had become so used to introducing myself as Nikki when in the company of other people that know me as Nikki, it actually became the default introduction in my mind.

So now about 90% of the people I know call me Nikki, even though I still answer the phone at work as Nicole. I'm actually wanting to go back to Nicole as much as possible, so I've been retraining my brain to introduce myself as Nicole or answer the phone as Nicole, no matter what company I'm in. I know a lot of people are still going to call me Nikki, and that's ok, but I think for my own sanity I need to get my old self back. The bad mental Nikki is getting kind of buried at the moment.

Why am I mentioning this?

When I signed up for my Gmail account I also labeled it as Nikki. I've recently changed it to Nicole. When I go to send myself a reminder email, I appear to still be in the habit of typing, "nik" in the TO field to find my name. Nikki is still tied to my junk mail account. Apparently I have been sending myself reminder emails that I have promptly been forgetting about because they were sent to the wrong email address.

*headdesk*

Anecdotes

*There were 4 Nicole's (including Nikkol) in my high school graduating class. All of us had last names that began with G.

**

smokedamage was traveling America via all of his American LJ friends, who all lovingly referred to him as Smokey. When we first met, he introduced himself to me with his real, full name, and his other LJ friends were all, woah that's your real name??? His real name stuck in my head, which was good when introducing him to my parents, but again it threw me a little when referencing him to others, because I had to pick which name to use.

***When my eldest nephew was born, mom and dad had to figure out what their grandparent names would be. In the meantime, I remembered back to when my cousin could never get my name right and called me Nikki-cole, because she had another cousin that she spent much more time with on a regular basis that went by Nikki. Knowing Aunt Nicole was going to be a bit difficult for people to spit out, I adopted Aunt Nikki. However, when I'm with the boys, that Nikki is almost a completely different persona in my mind than the online Nikki I had before. That one is the Most Awesomest Aunt Nikki In The Whole World, and really, who could argue with that?

Madness In My Method

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