Name: Nicole.
Appearance: Mutable. Blue-eyed one day; hazel the next. Sometimes Dutch; sometimes Canadian.
Ah, Nicole. I went out with a Nicole at secondary school. She got hit on the head with a cricket ball. Was that why she went out with you?
In retrospect, probably. Why is Nicole in the news? A student at the University of Calgary …
This story can’t end well. But it does. A student in Calgary called Carlos Zetina chatted up a Dutch exchange student called Nicole in a pub. He got her number but it turned out to be wrong.
Maybe Nicole was letting him down gently? Not really. She’d just arrived from Europe and couldn’t remember her new phone number.
So what did Carlos do? He sent out a mass email to all the Nicoles on campus – from professors to freshers. “If you don’t fit this description then ignore and if you are the one and just don’t want to talk to me that’s OK as well,” he wrote to 247 Nicoles.
Carlos sounds sweet. I know, right? He added: “If your name is Nicole and you’re from Holland and you think Nietzsche is depressing then text me.”
Whoa! Hold on a second. A Nicole from Holland who knows her Nietzsche? What happened next? All 247 of the University of Calgary Nicoles that Carlos contacted banded together to try to find her.
What can I say? Nicoles are like that, especially Canadian ones. They’re just better than the rest of us. Then an 80-member Facebook group dubbed “Nicole From Last night” was created. One of the Nicoles, Nicole Macmillan, tweeted: “We started a Facebook group, went out for drinks and now have a sisterhood that is going to meet every month. Carlos, our king, thank you.”
How lovely. But what happened to the captivating-sounding Dutch Nicole? She apparently didn’t have a campus email address so didn’t get Carlos’s message. But when she heard about the Facebook group, she contacted them and they passed on her details to Carlos.
Fabulous. Did you know the name Nicole is of Greek origin and means “victory of the people”?
That makes perfect sense. And famous Nicoles include Kidman, Scherzinger and Appleton?
That makes less sense. Any other top Nicoles who aren’t pop stars or actors? Well there are members of the University of Calgary academic staff: Nicole Letourneau (nursing), Nicole Wyatt (philosophy) and Nicole Sandblom (chemistry). After receiving Carlos’s email, they were all, one hopes, instrumental in Nicole and Carlos getting together.
Has romance blossomed between Dutch Nicole and King Carlos? They’ve arranged to meet at a bar next week, possibly with 247 other Nicoles in tow. What could possibly go wrong.
Don’t say: “Hey, weren’t you in the Pussycat Dolls?”
Do say: “What were you saying about Nietzsche before we were so rudely interrupted?”
