In my other life, where I don’t live the life of a superstar on the thirty-cents a week I make writing badly researched football articles on here, I have been forced to take a normal job. I ask no congratulations or sympathy for this, I mention it only because it has been a while since I went to work in a traditional workplace. I stopped working roughly two and a half years ago when I was made redundant. Since then I have lived the quiet life in Spain, spunked my redundancy up the wall and enjoyed a few months living the life of a bitcoin millionaire (I was never a millionaire). Now I am broke again. Worse than broke in fact, broke minus a whole bunch of money. Easy come easy go, as the man once said, I am responsible for this and so I'll take it on the chin.
In my other life, my real name isn’t Marcus either, it’s Dave or David, but mostly Dave. And it turns out that at my new job my name is also a long-standing joke. I discovered this fact on my first morning when I introduced myself to a fellow staff member.
“Oh wow!” She said. “You’re actually called Dave, that’s funny.” I should probably have told her there and then that there is nothing especially funny about being called Dave.
The truth of the matter is that I had already introduced myself to this member of staff just three minutes earlier in the canteen. She must have thought that I was kidding. The joke, so far as I can ascertain it after only three mornings, is that everybody calls each other Dave. It’s really one of those things that is a work of genius because, rather than despite, it’s simplicity. I even had my first experience of this today.
“Dave, meet Dave.” Said this same staff member when introducing me to somebody earlier on today.
“I’m sorry,” I said, having met this person of my my own accord just a few minutes earlier, “I thought your name was Steve?”
“It is Steve,” replied Steve, “it’s just kind of a thing we do here, you know, we all call each other Dave.”
“Right.” I said. “I remember now, Dave told me,” I said indicating Jennifer, my colleague from the first morning next to me.
This it seemed was the right thing to do, eliciting as it did, murmured laughs and general nods of approval. Apparently, just because my name is the butt of the joke, doesn’t mean that I can’t be involved.
In all honesty this is one of the reasons that Marcus was born. There are loads of Dave’s, there are even quite a lot of Dave’s with the same surname as me; googling myself before Marcus came along was a pretty dispiriting experience, there’s just a whole load of me’s out there and they're all doing much better stuff than me.
Marcus Braeburn may not be an enormous success either but at least there is only one of him and he's not the laughing stock of an entire department store.
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