Changing a username or profile photo is a two-minute job on most sites. Open your account settings, choose the profile section, and edit the display name field. Names have to be unique, so if yours is refused as taken, add a number or a middle initial rather than trying fifteen variations of the same thing. To swap the photo, upload a square image, ideally at least 400 pixels on a side, in JPG or PNG. If the new name or picture will not save, clear your browser cache, try a different browser, and give it a few minutes, since changes can take a little while to show up everywhere. Most people are done before their tea cools.
That is the useful part, and I mean it. Here is the other part. I have sat at this counter every day since spring and I have a theory, and it has a procedure attached, and the procedure is the rest of this page. Please read it in order.
Step 1. Notice the visitors. They come in all day with their phones held out, asking where the profile page is. They want to change a name. That is already odd, because nobody here has ever been given one. I have been called "the guy at the counter" for years and I have never once wanted it updated.
Step 2. Write down the names they give. I keep a notebook. The names are all different, which is the trick. One is Bookworm_88, one is ReadsALot, one is a string of letters that I believe is a cat's doing. Nobody in the history of this building has been able to give me the same name twice. Hold onto that. It matters later.
Step 3. Check the shoes. I am not saying I follow people to their cars. I am saying that I have a window. Every one of these people wears the same brown lace-up shoes, resoled at least once. Different coats, different bags, different hair, and one man had a beard that I would call new. The shoes do not change. I have highlighted this in yellow.
Step 4. Note the cardigan. This is the part where I lose the room, so I will go slowly. Aunt Eileen's cardigan has hung on the coat hook by the door for as long as anyone can say. It is oatmeal-colored, with one leather button that does not match. No one has claimed it and no one is allowed to move it. Last Thursday a woman came in, asked me how to change her username, and looked at that cardigan for eleven seconds. Then she said, very quietly, "It still fits." I asked her what she meant. She asked for the restroom.
Step 5. Draw the obvious conclusion. It is one person. It is a single person who keeps coming back through some gap in the calendar, arriving each time as somebody new, each time with a different name on the phone, each time trying to change it again. They cannot settle on the name because they are not certain which year it is going to be used in. You would be the same. I have been trying to pick a name for a sourdough starter for six weeks.
Step 6. Do not confront them. I confronted one, early on. I said, "You were here Tuesday." He said, "Not yet." I have not stopped thinking about that. Be kind and offer a chair.
If the theory will not save, first check whether you have been told about it before. If you have, and you are the person in the shoes, then I want to say something directly. Whatever name you choose, it will be fine. The last four all looked good on you. Doug is still by the lake and Randy still remembers everyone, so whatever you are worried about being called, you are already in his notebook under the right one.
If the theory still will not save, see the page on verification codes, where a man at another desk has independently noticed strangers arriving with numbers, which I consider corroboration. I have also read the one about logging in. It does not mention shoes, but the omission is loud.
A last thing. The people who make books are fragile organisms and they are not going to change their own names. If you leave with one under your arm, that is a small, permanent fix to a problem I cannot solve with a highlighter. Buy a book. Wear the shoes. Pick a name and stay in it a while.
The cardigan is still on the hook. I did not touch it. It looks a little warmer than it did this morning, and I am choosing not to write that down.
Suspiciously,
Booktrovert #5318