Before I came to Europe, I told people I had no sign name (technically I did, but I didn’t like it for several reasons). I told people to give me a new sign name, but they kept putting it off and just fingerspelling it… Until I came to Frontrunners. They got tired of spelling my name and saying I had no sign name very quickly, so they gave me one. You can see me signing it here. I tell the short story in the video, but the longer story is this:
I was flying to Europe for the very first time, from Rochester, NY to Toronto, Canada, then to Copenhagen, Denmark. I arrived in Copenhagen with no problem, headed straight to baggage claim to wait for my large duffel bag. After waiting for a long while, and seeing no one from my flight still there, I went up to the help desk. They had no clue what had happened to my bag, and I couldn’t really wait any longer because I had a bus to catch. I gave them contact info for Castberggård and left. They said that they’d deliver it to Castberggård once they found it, which was very nice of them. Since this was my first day at my new school, there was a lot of meeting new people. I was constantly saying, “Hi, my name is [fs:R-O-G-A-N], no sign name.” European signers despise spelling and try to do it as little as possible, especially for names. It didn’t take long for them to give me one, in just a couple of days in fact. They had a different one than the one I have now, but I told them that it wouldn’t work in ASL, because it’s a sign we use often. So my new sign name ended up being half of the sign for “lost” because of the misadventures with my bag. Three days after I’d arrived in Europe, my bag showed up! I was very relieved that it wasn’t lost forever, especially since the majority of my clothes were in it. While going over it, I noticed the baggage tags were still on it, and apparently it had somehow ended up flying to Alaska! How does that even happen? And that is the story of my sign name.
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