What’s in a Geocaching Name?

LANMonkey on Geocaching.com
LANMonkey on Geocaching.com

I’ve had a few people ask recently about where our Geocaching/social media name came from, but even that has prompted me to think about other people’s usernames and what the origin stories are.

So I thought the easiest way to address that is to write a blog post here to ask about all of yours, and share the back story of our user name.

So please feel free to add in the comments below and tell us your user name, and share the backstory on it! In the meantime, I’ll tell you where ours came from.

Some 25 years ago (or more, I guess) in the IT industry, personal computer networks were coming into their own in offices everywhere, replacing the “green screen” terminals connected to mainframes. I worked as one of the people who learned how to interconnect these PCs with each other and their servers via the Local Area Networks. And I was often one of the people up a ladder in the plenum space above the suspended ceilings pulling the cables and terminating them.

This climbing about resulted in the nickname of being a LAN-Monkey, which simply stuck with me for my entire varied professional career. When we took up the game of Geocaching and needed to come up with a user name for the system, we decided we’d just use that one “for now, and change it later.” It appears that later has not come and the name has really stuck.

So how about you? What’s the backstory on your geocaching name? And are you planning to change yours “later?” Go ahead and share your story, we’d love to hear it!

3 thoughts on “What’s in a Geocaching Name?

  • Yay! We finally know it now! Have been wondering this for a while.
    Funny how it’s actually what we thought it was – Local Area Network.

    Our name is The Curious Kiwis.
    Quite simple; People from New Zealand are nicknamed Kiwis, after our native flightless bird – not the fruit. Curious has everything to do with our Geocaching adventures – we are curious to new places, different cache containers, hiding spots, etc.

    Thanks for the story!

  • When we were young marrieds we enjoyed a cycling movie, “Breaking Away.” It is a touching story about growing up in a small town and not quite fitting in. One of the scenes involves an Italian cycling team, Team Cinzano, and we were smitten by the name for some reason. We christened ourselves “Team Moehrke” since we were two against the world, figuring out this married thing. Another dozen years and our team got a new member, our son, and then we started geocaching when he was seven, so we needed a team name. We just knocked out the space between the words and became TeamMoehrke. Been going at it for 18 years now.
    It was great meeting you two on the Caribbean cruise!

  • I used to work in forest entomology… cruising around studying beetles in the lumber yard mostly, but also up into the timber areas – researching what pheromones and kairomones would bring them in and keep them away… Insect “perfumes” if you will. Since it’s easier to say “bug” than “insect”, my friends called me buggirl. It stuck. But apparently there is another one out there as it was taken when I started caching… hence, everyone can tell how old I am! buggirl1975.

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