aka The Story of How Gadget Girl Came To Be

I get some seriously weird looks when I tell people my email address. And, inevitably, if I am giving it to someone over the phone, I spell it out for them and then they ask “Gadget Girl?” My response is almost always “Yeah, it’s a long story.”

Well, for the record, here’s the story (not that it is really that interesting, but what the heck).

In late 1998, I made my move into IT. I was working in the Publishing department of an investment bank downtown and was transferred into the Internet Services department of IT. At that time, a gig in IT came with all the free toys - a smaller laptop than the one I’d had upstairs, a Palm, a two-way pager, and a cell phone.

After a year or so of accumulating these toys, I happened to meet the person who eventually became my BEST-BESTEST friend in the whole world (and still is). He lived in Battery Park City at the time and every Friday after work, I would walk across the tip of the island to his place and we would go out to dinner, a movie, drinks or something, just to catch up on our week.

Somewhere along the way, he took to calling me Gadget Girl, because I always had so many gadgets on me. I thought it was cute and registered nycgadgetgirl (since gadgetgirl was taken) as a chat name to make him laugh.

Shortly thereafter, my daughter - T - went through her Super Hero phase. Every game she wanted to play was about super heros and super spies. Every weekend we would run around the apartment saving imaginary people and animals from insane perils and jumping from one alternate reality to another. We started to develop a storyline and she realized we needed SUPER HERO NAMES! Well, what better to call myself than Gadget Girl!

She named herself Rainbow Fly and we became super hero crime fighting spies in our imaginations. She registered a rainbowfly chat name and that, as they say, was that. My "secret identity" soon became my every day online self. T has since dropped the Rainbow Fly name, of course, but I think I could be stuck with nycgadgetgirl for a long time to come.

And now you know the rest of the story.