What’s in a Name Like Dave Rage?

A question that I am asked quite often, relates to my chosen Twitter name – @daverage.

Before we get into that, I want to clear one thing up. It is Dave Rage, not the Excel function, DAverage!

Back to the story.  Dave has-been with me since university. On one of the first nights in the halls of residence, we all decided to make door signs for each other. The thing was, no one could spell Andrzej, so they decided to call me Dave!

That stuck with me and from that day onwards, I was known as Dave.

The Rage bit relates to an old N64 game, WCW Mayhem. It was one of the first games to include full audio commentary and as such required you to choose an in ring nickname. In the house I was living in by then, we all made our own characters and chose a nickname – mine was Rage.

Dave Rage was born!

This new persona followed me into online gaming, evening being integrated into the name of my Command and Conquer Rengade / Call of Duty clan, Rage’s Renagdes.

When I joined Twitter, I decided to stick with it, not expecting Twitter to be such a big part of my more professional life. How wrong was I!? The trouble was, by the time I realised how important it was, @daverage was more well known than Andrzej Marczewski – so I decided to keep it.

So,  20 years after Dave Rage was born, he is still here and stronger than ever!

Why not share your username stories in the comments?

 

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6 thoughts on “What’s in a Name Like Dave Rage?”

  1. My nick name comes from a student project we did at university. I was queen of all hardware incl. our own wifi router. And despite the fact I made a nice wiki page with all the access data, the guys always came to me to administrate their devices. Thus I became RouterAdmin first – a hallowed name whispered by my disciples in their time of need. 😀
    Then one day they decided I needed to become a proper civilized person with a Twitter account. Alas, Twitter doesn’t (or didn’t back then) allow for the word admin in user accounts, possibly to prevent social engineering. So operator was the next best thing and stayed with me.

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  2. Mine is bombuslucorum, and it was simply because the back of a cd single I bought, had a picture of a white tailed bumblebee on it; bombuslucorum. I’ve stuck with it as it’s not commonly used. Plus I’m the same shape and shouldn’t be able to fly 😉

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  3. I have to admit I thought it was D average as well! LoL Easier for me to remember it that way.

    When I first joined Twitter I too never dreamed how much it would be part of what I do everyday. At that time I already used EducatorAl for my gmail and my website domain. When deciding on a domain I searched my name, Alfonso Gonzalez. There are A LOT of us out there! Al Gonzalez was no better and a lot of them played baseball or something like that. I wanted to stand out and Educator Al was free so I took it. I ready like it but unless I capitalize the E and the A people can’t tell what it is. 🙂

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  4. I have the same issue as you Andrzej (you will always be DaveRage to me after our “last one bouncing on the bed” games in COD MW2!) – “moobit” as a nickname/character/brand identity is more well known in gaming/tech circles than “Carl” is – so much so that I’ve simply accepted that it is also identity in my professional life.
    The name came from when my Wife and I were visiting her Parents up in Blackpool her home town. We went to the local pub quiz which has a prize for the winners and a prize for best team name based on the theme of the week (animals) – we took the sounds of our two favorite animals (mine a cow: MOO, and hers a Frog: ribBIT) – moobit was born! I took on the mantle in my online/You Tubing/Podcasting life for DPA/accountability reasons (as I worked in medicine at the time), and as my content got out there over the years, the name stuck with everyone! 🙂

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  5. I love the stories behind usernames. I’ve had many over the years. My first one back in the screeching pterodactyl modem days was nohogumbo because I was living in the NoHo neighborhood of NYC at the time and am originally from New Orleans where gumbo is like mother’s milk. lol Most places these days I go by valarywithawhy because I’m curious and like to promote curiosity in others and it’s a play on the spelling of my first name which has always been a challenge for people to spell correctly.

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