I’ve had several 1 minutes of fame. I have gotten little to nothing out of them.
I was a teeny tiny kid on the front of the local paper (VA) painting one of those fundraising thermometers (I have NO idea what the fundraising was for). This got me nothing but a page in my step-mothers scrap book.
I was still a teeny tiny kid when I had a bit role in an indi short. I can’t remember the name of it to save my life. A quick google of what I thought it might be didn’t turn it up. I will now spend the rest of the evening hunting it down. This got me nothing but a case of “ARGH, what WAS it called!”
I was in a photo in high school that is still used (25 years later) in advertising. This got me nothing but being introduced as “she is in the cherry tree picture”
I was interviewed for the a different local paper (SC) when I was in college as part of a piece about what the ‘young folk’ thought about Dole vs Clinton. This got me nothing
I wrote a column in an industry weekly magazine talking about how to treat your temporary replacements (aka farm-sitters) that got me a job offer out of the blue from an obviously crazy person.
I am famous within certain circles at Amazon (AWS) about knowing more about their backend operations than the people who are in charge of them. This has gotten me jack shit other than ever increasing frustration.
I was in a percussion practice room in college and someone came down and said they need a kit drummer upstairs in the auditorium because the one who was supposed to play had a class or some such. A few minutes later I was onstage playing with Charles Brown.
I used to play bar trivia and won a lot of national games, including winning a trip to New Orleans out of it. Of course, I used a handle, and not my real name, but I was pretty famous in the trivia community under the handle.
Way back in 1985, when the Macintosh 512K was available along with the LaserWriter and applications such as Aldus PageMaker and MacDraw, I was an early adopter of the Mac for desktop publishing at the Silicon Valley telecom startup where I was publications manager.
Apple was looking for people to interview for an in-house video they were developing about the Mac in business, and they got my name from the Aldus folks. For my segment, I talked about how the setup helped us avoid the “lowest-bidder look” in our technical publications, and demonstrated creating a technical diagram in 15 minutes that would have taken me 45 using traditional hand methods.
And then I forgot about it until a few months later, when browsing in a computer store, the person behind the counter said, “say, aren’t you [my real name]?” They had seen the video in some training. I was pleasantly surprised and enjoyed the recognition.
Having the first construction photos and updates of Tokyo DisneySea from 2000-2001 on my Disney fansite. I got widely known among online Disney fan circles. Just an FYI, but the theme park was just named “Best Theme Park in the World” for the fifth year in a row.
I had a Letter to the Editor published in USAToday several years ago. Big Whoop.
And I’ve had a few tourists refer to recommendations I had made in blog posts under a different online handle and then ask me what I think of the recommendation without knowing I was the one who wrote it.
When I was about I made the front-page, above-the-fold big picture on the hometown newspaper. Sitting there with sad looks on our faces, in winter attire, on a sled, which was on green grass. Seems the weathermen have been blowing forecasts for a long time.
I was specialized cast & crew for a major motion picture.
I was recently featured in a TV news story (produced by another Doper)
