The first more perfect moment of his life was when he was one of the many thousands of users to join a soon to be famous, forever unnamed within the context of this story, social media website. Rather than taking this opportunity to be the user on this site with a username that is simply their legal first name, or the word Car. Or bat. Or um. They picked:
tomcruise
What, he wondered, if, he pondered, Tom ever joins this site? Tom Cruise is really rich, we all know this. He would also, probably, really want a username on this social media platform that is just his name. Who wouldn’t? If someone were to impersonate him and say something bad, he might not get to be in any more movies, and he would lose a lot of money. Perhaps Tom would calculate the potential loss of letting this username stay in this man’s hands and compare it to the selling price that this man would sell it for, oh hum maybe… 5 million dollars? He would compare the 60 billion dollar he’d lose from having me, or this man, impersonate him on this social media website (Imagine if he posted an old meme to it, and everyone thought it wasn’t funny!) to the 5 million dollar’s he’d have to pay this man and uh… just do it.
Think about the value of those 11 keystrokes that man took (9 to type it out, 1 extra for an extra e at the end and another to press backspace to remove it). 11 Damn Keystrokes for 5 million dollars. Who wouldn’t see that and have their eyes turn Times new Roman 12 pt bold font d-d-d-dollar signs? Here, I’ll show you: $ $. Well, actually the font might be different depending on where you’re reading this. It looks good to me right now though!
This is how the obsession grew. Each “stolen” username was another chunk of cash into his child’s college fund. Or his child’s child college fund. Or the man himself’s fund into things like cars and tasty food. Stolen, in quotation marks, because well, really, we don’t actually know that Tom Cruise wanted it. He never owned it in the first place, and hey, maybe this guy’s name IS Tom Cruise. We could assume that if it wasn’t already specified that “tomcruise” was specifically not his name. Or actually, we only said “first name” before. “Legal first name”. So he could just be Tom. But believe me, he’s not.
More and more of these usernames stacked up in his possession, dormant, clean, ready to be sold off to the highest bidder that also happens to be a celebrity with the same name. A crazy person, perhaps, would take this opportunity to impersonate these people. You think, oh what a poor sad man sitting alone in his parent’s disgusting basement, spending all of his time on this, yes, still unnamed, social media site. He wishes he was somewhere else. He wishes he was someone else, that’s why he collects them all. But no, it is just greed. He is just chasing the dollar. Really, who could blame him? He’s just looking out for his future.
So why, then, I ask… why did he end up taking all of the first names too? Donna. Samantha. Tyler. Kyle. Mike. Even Michael. He’s always there, as soon as these sites go up to take them. But no celebrity is just named Tyler. And no Tyler has 5 million to buy that name back! So hey… if you’re reading this… can you give me a discount? We all know it’s normal to just want your legal first name as your account name, but it’s not normal to do all this. I don’t even think you live in a basement or anything, I get you… but come on… can I have it, please?