The Doctor D Society

The Doctor D Society

Can a label be… our destiny?

Thinking back to high school now. My nickname was “Doc.”

Not because I wanted to be a doctor. Not even the non-health-giving kind that I would eventually become.

It happened because one of my high school pals, whom we had already nicknamed “Captain Al,” noticed that the words “doc” and “Dave” both start with… wait for it… the letter D.

Look it up. He’s not wrong!

I liked that label. My friends called my Doc or Doctor D. And I believe that at my high school there were at least two and maybe three Doctors. I can tell you that one of them, much larger and stronger than I would ever be, did not like sharing his nickname with me. While he did not become a doctor, he did grow up to become the example of a “fake driver’s license to watch out for” used as part of my 7-Eleven cashier training in 1984. And his name also did not even start with D.

Some things are just hard to explain.

Then we finished high school and that was pretty much the end of that.

Now in my current gig, I am sometimes called Doctor D and it always makes me smile. Realistically, though, everybody in my academic hallway deserves to be called Doctor for real and off the top of my head I can think of five of us who can genuinely, by dint one or more Ds among our initials, lay claim to being Doctor D. The Doctor D Society, we could call ourselves.

Like so many of us, I had a few nicknames as a kid, most of them used as weapons and not meant as compliments. Many of them hurt.

I’m so glad I finally ended up with one I like.

How about you? What did your friends call you?

See you tomorrow!