13. The Handle Story of @grondmaster
Well, to say that I am a ‘Lord of the Rings’ fan would be an understatement. The history of my handle started off many years ago when we were watching the movie version of ‘Return of the King’ at a friend’s house. But of course, subtitles were on since some of us were too slow to understand the dialogues being spouted by Gandalf & his friends.
Bang during the siege of Gondor, insanity peeked at us from behind the screen. The ‘Grond’, a massive battering ram, shaped like a wolf, fire spewing from its mouth, was brought into action. The orcs started shouting, “Grond”, “Grond”, “Grond”, and one of us decided to start supporting them, by reading out the subtitles loud enough for the building a fair distance away to hear. We were able to shut him up by locking him in the next room till the battle was over, but the seed was planted.
The next day, another of us messaged us all saying that he’d received a promotion. My reply was ‘Congrats! When’s the party?’, as were all other replies except for, you guessed it, this particular sample. His reply? ‘Grond’. We gave up all hopes of him coming back to sanity an evening later, when he emailed us a heavily parodied version of Keats’ ‘Daffodils’, converted to a droll ‘Grondofills’, and named himself ‘The Grond King’. The whole mad phase, ‘Grondomania’ as I call it, lasted a few weeks. I called myself ‘Grondmaster’, another guy become ‘HyperGrond Beserker’, and what not.
A few weeks after this passed on, I was registering on some online forums, where using random usernames is the norm. The name that came to my mind first had already been taken. So I remembered my nickname from the Grondomania phase, aka Grondmaster, and tried registering with it. Got the registration, and the nickname stuck. My participation in the forum became very involved, and there I was, better known as Grondmaster than the guys who invented the whole madness. Then, Orkut was the norm & Facebook unheard of – my name there was also the same so that users of the forum could connect with me on Orkut as well.
When I joined Twitter in 2009, it was obvious enough to use the same userID that I was already known for in the electronic world, and now linking on all my social media accounts. So although I’ve been on Twitter for over two years now, I became active only a few months ago, hence have less than 2% of the counts that many of my friends have.
And that’s The Handle Story of @grondmaster.