What a gorgeous morning in New York City. Fall is in the air, and I am wearing a tweed coat. That is one of the things I love about living in the Northeast – changing of the seasons.
I’ve gotten a few messages from people asking me where ‘arshimbo.com’ comes from and what it means. This is an easy one. It’s the phonetic spelling/pronunciation of my last name. When you’re born with more than 2 syllables in your name – and 10 letters – it can be challenging. You can only imagine the manners in which my name has been murdered over the years. Archi-bald. Arch-im-bow (as in please curtsy for the audience), which was amongst the worst. My friends in high school used to joke and call me ‘itchy-balls.’. Some joke…
When the ‘internet’ came along, I’d toyed around with doing this then. I first bought the URL in 1997. It lapsed and someone else bought it in 2000 or so. Why they did is beyond me. Nothing ever lived on the page…and there was no email or contact info for me to hit them up. Lord knows, I did want to ask what made them want this URL that almost no one else could care about.
I had also entertained the idea of legally changing my name to ‘Andre Arshimbo.’ Talk about making it easier on me…and everyone else. I did not have the guts…and since then, I have grown accustomed to it. However, all my email addresses are ‘andre@’ or ‘aaa@’ (since I am AAA). I hate having the chore of spelling my name out every time!!!
Also worth noting that when, in 2001, I was laid off from CBS News, I did an internet search of myself and the guy I used to work for and I was disappointed to not only find him online with a bunch of articles about news-gathering and more but I was further disappointed to see that I was not the only ‘Andre Archimbaud’ in the world (I had always figured as much, but the proof was never a few keystrokes or clicks away) and I was nowhere to be found.
Then as now, there is an Andre Archimbaud who is a muckey-muck for a very large international pharma outfit in Canada. Ironically, when I stay in Boston, I stay at the Copley Plaza. When I went to check in there about a year ago, and I’d not stayed there in 5 or 6 years, being greeted by ‘Welcome back, Mr. Archimbaud. We always love having you…’ I knew our world just got a lot smaller.
Now, when I search for me on the internet, I find me first, him second.
So, now that you know, aren’t you glad you asked! 🙂