The title of my blog stems from my early professional years, when I was a Product/Facilities Engineer at a manufacturing plant. There was a good group of 20-something peeps that all got along well. So well, in fact we still hang out together from time to time as schedules, babies, and lives permit. There's a pile of good stories that can be told, but this is not the purpose of this post.
Since we all pretty much hated our jobs and felt like the man was beating us down on a daily basis, we called the company 'The Sweatshop,' and the good group of peeps was 'The Sweatshop Crew.' Generally speaking, Fridays were group lunch days, and since I was in Plant Engineering I was always stuck in the shit and had to get paged over the P.A. system that everyone else was waiting for me. This wouldn't have been a big deal except the P.A. was used for all support requests, which meant that everyone heard every page. Like a really bad game of telephone, whatever was heard was relayed over and again. At some point somebody from the factory floor paged me as "Andy Messner" so the name stuck. It became somewhat of a game to me to correct people and since I can be that harsh, I would walk up and tell the offending pager that the N in my name was silent. My humor was lost on them, based on the blank stares I regularly got.
In any event, other variations were also paged so my Crew decided it was funny to page me in the same fashion. Mesner, Mefner, Muffler, Mexner - any concoction of letters, they said it. One of my friends took a liking to Mexler so that anytime we had to put our name in for a restaurant Mexler was given. And so it stuck.
The werks part of it is from my German heritage, and the fact that I dig Bavarian Motor Works, which is long for BMW. As I've previously posted, I'm somewhat handy, and tend to do things myself. Coincidentally, same friend that coined Mexler also began saying I had a shop for cars based on the work I did to my cars, etc. The German word for shop can loosely be translated into Works, or spelled with an 'e' in German parlance soooooo..... 1 + 2 = 3... Mexlerwerks is born.
There's more to that story but again, that is not the purpose of this post.
No, the purpose of the post to prove that this viral marketing on the interweb is a real phenomenon.
For several years now, I have been sponsored by Crank Brothers for my cycling endeavors and every order I place, my name is written by me correctly spelling my last name. Never once have I hinted at an alternative spelling. To my enjoyment, I laughed out loud when I saw the address from a recent package from Crank Brothers:
Now either people have a hard time reading the letters I typed in the computerized form I filled out (ie, did not hand write anything) or this blog actually has readership. For ego's sake I'll take the latter.
So for those readers out in Cali - Laguna Beach in particular - You make sweet pedals. And a lot of other sweet bike parts. And sweet apres' ride gear. Keep it up. Thanks.
later.
-the ATM
