Two Thousand Tom Thomases Written February 20, 2001 Playing around today, I entered "Janet Olson" (a friend from college) in an Alta Vista search engine.  It turns out that there are 38 people listed by that name in U.S. phone books. Only 38 Janet Olsons?  The name isn't that unusual. Apparently, my name is unusual.  Often when I check in at an airline ticket counter or a hotel, the clerk looks at my card and does a double take.  "Is this really your name?  Thomas Thomas?  Boy, that's something.  You must get lots of comments about that.  I haven't seen a name like that before, though I did know a David Davidson once.  How do you know whether people are calling you by your first name or your last?" So I tried the search engine on myself.  I entered Thomas as a last name and searched for first names beginning with Tom and Thom, to get all the variations.  It turns out that I share my name with 1,530 other people, or about 40 times as many as Janet!  And that doesn't include children or people with unlisted phone numbers.  Nor does it count people like my grandfather Tommy Thomas.  His real name was Hubert Thomas, but some folks called him "Tommy" the way they might refer to a John Smith as "Smitty." So a couple of thousand Americans might have my name.  In Pennsylvania alone, there's a Thomas B. Thomas in three different cities. But there is one way that I can be unique.  No one in the nation is listed as T. Buckingham Thomas!