I am Peter Lynn

I got an e-mail very much like this one this morning:

From: Victor@Initech.com
To: Peter@Initech.com
06/02/2006 09:20 AM
Subject: see link

http://www.peterlynnkites.co.nz/

congratulations

Victor

What he's telling me is that there's a guy in New Zealand with the same name as me who makes kites. This is the equivalent of telling Jay Pinkerton that he shares a name with the co-holder of the record for the youngest prisoner ever executed in the state of Texas. (Texans looking to break the record, take note: if you're older than 24, you're shit out of luck.) I know. He knows. We're the kind of dudes who Google themselves.

In fact, if you Google "Peter Lynn" right now without subtracting all kinds of terms such as "kites", "boards", and "buggies", you have to wade through five pages of kite-related nonsense before you find a hit related to me. There's an article titled "Peter Lynn is Furious", which really sounds like it might be about me, but isn't. (It's about the kite dude being pissed at the Guinness Book of Records for taking away one of his records and giving it to the Chinese, who incidentally achieved the first human flight on record when emperor Kao Yang forced prisoners to fly in giant kites; the first surviving pilot, Yuan Huang-T'ou, was rewarded by having his sentence commuted to death by starvation. There's one for you, Texas.) Anyway, believe me, I know about the kite dude.

There was a time when I didn't know. My first inkling that I might not be the only Peter Lynn in the whole world came back in university when some lady e-mailed my old Hotmail account asking for instructions on how to put her kite together. Why she was asking me, I didn't know, but I just made up some instructions and sent them back. (Take it from me: You never go wrong with "insert Tab A in Slot B". That goes for kite construction, sex education, and any number of other things.)

I didn't see an actual Peter Lynn kite in person for another few years, when I was playing frisbee down at the waterfront with Scott, and some guy was kiteboarding. There, in the sky, PETER LYNN was emblazoned across the fabric in huge black letters. That just didn't feel right to me. Unless you're receiving a marriage proposal via skywriting or a big banner being dragged by an airplane, it's an odd, violating experience to see your name written in the sky if you didn't put it there. If I'd had any ID on me at the time to prove I was Peter Lynn, I'd probably have tried to confiscate it. After all, my name was written on it. Last I checked, that's a rock-solid claim to ownership.

The point is: I know about the Peter Lynn kite guy. He's all over the web. Google loves him way more than it loves me. So he's basically my sworn enemy.