Handles, usernames, nicknames, or whatever you want to call them, many of us leave breadcrumb trails around the web using names that aren’t related to our given names. For me, that is either triviaqueen or victriviaqueen in most places. So who made me queen? Well, that dubious honor belongs to my friend Diana.
Many, many years ago, when we were still in university, I had a knack of being able to rattle off answers to very useless trivia questions — name all the members of the Brady Bunch! how many stitches on an official MBA baseball? who sang the song Bette Davis eyes? — nothing that helped me get ahead in life but was nonetheless cluttering my brain. In the years before everyone had a smartphone on hand to find the answer, it was my party trick and claim to fame. One night, after pulling out the answer to something ridiculously obscure, she crowned me TriviaQueen and it stuck.
Entering the internet era, when I needed to pick an email name and realized I didn’t have to use Cheryl, I picked triviaqueen. As new services popped up I often claimed triviaqueen as my identity. However, when I started with LiveJournal, triviaqueen was already taken! I was shocked and annoyed but that’s when I added “vic” (for Victoria) to the front-end and “victriviaqueen” was born. Similarly, I claimed triviaqueen on Twitter when I first joined in 2007 but I deleted that account after about 4 months of stumbling around in early days. When I returned two years later, that username had been claimed by someone else so victriviaqueen was the one I chose.
Now it’s a mix between the two out there but my friends still appreciate the triviaqueen nickname as seen in the photo attached. That’s me in a crown made from bits of a Trivial Pursuit game by another friend, Christobel. Yes, I wore it for one entire birthday celebration and I still have it tucked away in the closet.