Nicknames

Have you ever noticed that in aviation many of us have nicknames? I’ve conducted some informal research into how such persons get nicknames. There seems to be varying reasons for these monikers

1) You’ve committed some act of shear buffoonery, and your adoring colleagues have either overtly or covertly started to call you by a nickname reflective of such buffoonery. A nickname I’ve managed to shake over the years is “Bingo.” I was once deployed with my USAF mates. We were at the base club where there was a big bingo game going on. It just so happens that the bingo hall is were some of my buddies were eating dinner. I casually walked up to them and asked if they were playing bingo? Everyone in that hall heard only one word of that query; “bingo”. Players, who assumed someone had called the winner started to tear up their cards and mutter this and that! After I picked up my jaw from the table I started blurting out that I was only asking a question to my friends…no use. The bingo caller asked (on the PA) that I leave the hall in no uncertain terms, and players were saying things my mother would not appreciate. Needless to say, that story spread pretty quickly, and friends would greet me with the salutation of “Hi Bingo!” My real friends call me “Royboy,” thank you. The unofficial bulletin board of such newly christened nicknames seems to be the bathroom stall walls; you don’t want to gain a nickname that way! Most of the time these are in jest.

2) You’re simply an idiot associated with the hind quarters of a Donkey, and you deserve the nickname. The difficulty with this is that no one will call you this name directly to your face; you have however, become increasingly suspicious of that person spoken of on the walls of stall three.

3) People like you, and the use of the nickname is reflective of that adoration. I remember a certain Pirates baseball player who had the nickname “The Hammer,” or the “Refrigerator.” We have an employee named Mark Davis. His initial are MD, so his friends call him “Doc.” What’s really cool at Tracer is that we have rather loose protocols on our email addresses, so his is 'doc@tracercorp.com’ (yes mine is Royboy@tracercorp.com).

4) In the military, flyers get call signs that become nicknames. At Tracer we have several former Marine Corp aviators whose call signs live on in perpetuity as an act of internal Customs And Courtesies. There’s Mo (Morales), Chico (Gomez), Goody, (Goudreau), and Mongo (Torielli, nope, I don’t understand that one). Their email addresses reflect these too. I’m told that these are entirely unofficial, and can be changed, if for example you commit an aforementioned act of buffoonery. 

5) Ever notice that many nicknames assigned during your childhood days are down right cold? “Four-eyes”, “Shorty”, “Dumbo”, and “peg-leg” are examples of the mentionables. Fortunately we outgrow those. These kids…