Rhyming names are my madeleine

Mary Worth, 4/12/23

Of the several minimum wage office temp jobs I held between semesters when I was in grad school, probably the best was the summer I spent in a vault under the Wells Fargo HQ in downtown San Francisco, helping alphabetize a huge collection of wills that had been entrusted to various regional banks that Wells Fargo had absorbed over the previous decade. This job was the “best” in the sense that we were let into the vault in the morning and ushered out at night and otherwise received no supervision, had no real set goals or other sense of how fast we were supposed to be going, could play music as loud as we wanted and take two-hour lunches, could answer the phone down there by saying “Hello, you’ve reached … The Vault” as if we were working at the city’s hottest nightclub, etc. Now, if you were someone who had in fact gvien your last will and testament to the San Luis Obispo Savings and Loan for safekeeping, my job activities that summer might’ve given you some pause, as we were definitely not trained in any kind of archival preservation techniques and even our alphabetizing was a little haphazard; but most of the wills we were dealing with had been filed decades earlier and had probably been superseded by newer ones, while the old forgotten wills had simply been passed from bank to bank, long after the customers’ deaths, until they ended up in our lap, because some cover-your-ass decision by the legal department mandated that Wells Fargo had to do the bare minimum to make any specific will in the pile findable in a pinch.

Anyway, I remember two things about the wills, which we temps absolutely would open up at random and read to one another: they often contained a lot of juicy family drama, especially concerning what were euphemistically referred to as the “natural children” of the person writing the will, and some of the names were very funny. Unfortunately, because this was 25 years ago and my brain has mostly puddingified in the interim, the only name from the list that I can remember specifically is “Stella Patella,” but you have to admit that’s a pretty good one! This has been a very long and roundabout way to say that I loved today’s Mary Worth because it taught me that one fun aspect of working at a vet is that you get to learn all the wild things people name their pets, which probably range from the very good to the very bad. It doesn’t make up for all the depressing euthanasia business, but I bet it’s pretty neat.