Are You Dave Thomas?

I was looking through the photos on my mobile phone earlier today and found this one of a jeweller's shop in Belfast I took a few weeks ago.

It got me thinking about how many other people must have my name and this in turn got me thinking about comedian Dave Gorman's excellent book, Are You Dave Gorman? In the book, his mate (Danny Wallace) set him a challenge to find and meet 54 other Dave Gormans (or Dave Gormen). It took Gorman around 6 months to meet 54 others and he has now received notice of thousands of others (and no longer travels to meet them as the challenge is over).

I wondered how quickly, using the internet I could find 54 Dave Thomases (is that the correct pluralisation of Thomas?) although I have no intention of meeting them.

My first stop was Friends Reunited. There are 256 registered Dave Thomases and exactly 400 David Thomases in just UK & Ireland. That took about 30 seconds, making Dave Gorman look like an amateur. There is a further 1 David Thomas registered with their New Zealand site and 9 Dave Thomases and 80 David Thomases on their Australian site. That's a total of 746 Dave Thomases on friends reunited alone (although I'm one of them, so make that 745 new Dave Thomases).

I work for one of the biggest companies in the UK - BT has 104,400 employees. According to the internal telephone directory 10 of them are called Dave Thomas and 19 are called David Thomas. When I take myself out of the equation that's 28 new Dave Thomases!

One of my previous employers, Telewest, used to have a further 2 Dave Thomases and at one stage one of them was my boss, which got pretty confusing at times.

Using the Internet Movie Database which lists cast and crew for all TV and Films, I found another 20 Dave Thomases and 32 David Thomases (see photo, left promoting The Dave Thomas Comedy Show).

Before I even start a general google search for my name I thought I'd summarise where I am so far:

1. Dave Thomas - Me
2 - 746. Registered Dave/David Thomas Friends Reunited Users
747 - 774. Dave/David Thomas BT employees
775 - 776. Dave Thomas Telewest employees.
777 - 828. Dave/David Thomas TV & Film Actors & Crew

Now moving on to a general google search I found several other Dave Thomases. I will update this section as and when I get a chance:

829. Dave Thomas - Author of a series of books called The Pragmatic Programmer (pictured left).

830. Dave Thomas - A golf course designer (pictured right).

831. Dave Thomas - A Professor of Geography at Hertford College, Oxford (left).





832. Dave Thomas - The founder of the US fast food chain, Wendy's (right). Quite a few Americans have pointed this out to me in the past.



833. Dave Thomas - Singer and guitarist in the Dave Thomas Band (left).







834. Dave Thomas - An Irish singer/songwriter (see tee-shirt, right).



845. Dave Thomas - Photographer . Coincidentally, this guy is a tutor on The Open College of The Arts Photography course that I am undertaking.

846. Dave Thomas - Ran for American political office (left).

847. David Thomas - singer with Pere Ubu.






More to come...