odsox87: A History

Ahhh, odsox87. We go way back, almost ten years now! All of my online accounts are under odsox87 and I shudder at the thought of receiving those red lines exclaiming “username not available”. After all, such a long time of typing the same keys in the same pattern, I consider odsox87 to be ME, no one else.

I don’t consider the story behind how I came to be affiliated with odsox87 to be particularly interesting, but I’ll let you be the judge of that. I suppose it starts with MSN messenger and, at the impressionable age of 13, it felt as if everyone was using it. It seemed to be the most popular after-school hang out joint and I wasn’t exactly the outdoors type. “Internet” and “computer” were synonymous to me at that age: I had been shown the wonderful world of the Internet but I had no idea how to use it besides trying to guess at URLs. Additionally, this was back in the day when pop-up ads were a very prominent feature. All in all, my early experiences of using the Internet weren’t brilliant.

And now there was MSN. I can’t remember the first time I heard of it, all I know is that I finally decided to follow my peers and join in the after-school club that was instant messaging. Somewhere along the lines, I was either told or managed to work out for myself, that you needed a hotmail account if you wanted to use MSN.

Enter: My mother.

My mum knows a lot about computers and Internet and email (and all that other boring stuff when you’re 13). Who better to ask? She was very helpful and pretty much did everything for me. I just had to sit back and let her fill in all my details (I know, super difficult stuff!). But the username was down to me.

I consider myself to be creative, sure, but trying to come up with a username was one of the most difficult things I ever had to do. I didn’t want something that other people had, which basically meant I didn’t want anything with numbers after it,. To me, numbers gave the impression that I was the Nth person to have creatively thought of X. No, I wanted something unique.

I simply couldn’t do it. Eventually, after quite some time bouncing ideas off each other, my mum came up with “drunkengrandad” as a humorous suggestion. I liked it, so drunkengrandad it was.

However, the novelty quickly wore thin. Approximately four emails got sent from my drunkengrandad account, all to my dad, who worked on the rigs back then. Eventually, after realising that I was too embarrassed to associate myself with it, the account was abandoned.

And I was back to square one. Details filled in and thinking of a name. It was a lot easier to come up with a name this time. Those four emails I had sent to my dad had had a theme; the subject was random and literally had nothing to do with the content of the email. It was a little joke between my dad and me. Just imagine signing in and finding an email titled “Cooking Carrots”! Hilarious!

Aaaanyway, one of the subjects had been “Odd Socks and String Vests”. I have no idea how I came up with this other than perhaps I had been wearing odd socks that day (I’ve never worn a string vest though). I liked “odd socks” so decided to make it cute by spelling it phonetically.

Alas, odsox was taken. Gah! That meant one of two things. Either think of something else (nooo!) or admit defeat and accept a numerical suffix (ok, fine!). Why 87? Quite simply, that’s the year of my birth and I couldn’t think of anything better.

And thus, odsox87 was born and we’ve been best friends ever since…