“Tenyrsgon”

I thought I’d discuss the origin of the name “Teny”. When I first ventured online nearly 9 years ago, I was really into chatting. Particularly in chat rooms on AOL. I made lots of friends in a 2-year span. I don’t really chat anymore. It got old pretty fast.

Instead of the usual JSmith0704 format, I created a different screenname. Seeing all the different names people had, I couldn’t come up with anything real creative. I decided on taking my favorite Led Zeppelin song and making it my name. Ten Years Gone was the song, but due to the character limit imposed by AOL at the time, my name was Tenyrsgon. My profile was another play on Zep tunes (Name: Poor Tom, Location: Over The Hills And Far Away, you get the idea).

When chatting, people tend to cut your name short if it’s too long to type. Instead of calling me “Ten”, it was “Teny”. And it stuck. A circle of friends knew me by that name, and it spawned various screennames: TenysBack, TenysHere, and CL’s favorite, TenyBear. After moving to the Midwest, I couldn’t use TenyBear (at the time AOL had restrictions with using names on different accounts). So Teny jr was created and is still used to this day.

Next time, I’ll tell you how Teny met CL.