I think I should preface this anecdote by introducing myself. My name is Brianna Vaccari, and for as long as I can remember, people in my life who know me fairly well always called me by the nickname “Bri.”

Also, a love for tea is in my blood. I’m Welsh, and my grandmother loyally recognized “tea time” as a fourth meal in her daily routine. “Tea time” was always promptly at 4 p.m. and was occasionally accompanied by scones, cookies, biscotti etc. Pinkies up!

So I grew up drinking tea: hot chamomile for a cold or before bed, Earl Grey or black tea in the mornings, green tea for an energy boost and iced tea in the summer. Now I even buy eccentric flavors of loose-leaf tea in bulk from super hipster tea and herb shops. I just can’t ever get enough tea.

I love tea so much that when I was 4-years-old and got to choose how I wanted to decorate my room, I picked a tea party theme. My room was painted a pastel pink with stenciled flowers here and there. I had portraits depicting Elizabethan-dressed cats drinking tea around an elaborately set table on my walls. Decorative tea cups and tea pots littered my shelves and furniture surfaces, too.

My room stayed like this until I was 12-years-old. (How embarrassing, I know.)

I grew up a bit and took my tea-loving to a whole new level. When I was in middle school it became “cool” to use instant messenger to talk to friends on the Internet, and, eventually, when I got into high school MySpace IM and various social media networks became popular.

When first picking out a username for an email address at the age of 12, I didn’t put a lot of thought into it. I used whatever came to mind first.

I came up with a username integrating the phrase “tea party” and my popular nickname “Bri.” It was simple. It described my personality and preferences. It incorporated my popular nickname””and it even rhymed a bit. Perfecto!

So that username stuck throughout all of middle school and high school. I used it whenever I needed to create an account or username for a website. It just worked.

To this day, typing that username and its corresponding password is second nature. My fingers find the keys quickly and instinctively. To be completely honest, it has become a sort of endearing identity for me, and thinking about it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside.

Then I experienced a lapse of judgment and fell victim to habit. I also used the username when I began filling out college applications. I had to create an account so that I could save my applications and access them later; it only seemed natural to use the same username I had been using for years.

So when I accepted Fresno State’s admission offer, the username was automatically attached to the front of my @mail.fresnostate.edu email address.

During the spring semester of my sophomore year I began taking more classes in my major, beginning with media writing, a pre-req for most other mass communication and journalism classes.

My professor was Dr. Gary Rice, who is still well known for his intense coursework and unwavering grading and expectations.

After a lot of blood, sweat and tears he decided I was a good student and chose a number of other students and myself for a little project that was separate from his usual coursework.

Election Day was a few months out, and The Fresno Bee was compiling online profiles of candidates in numerous counties. It proved to be an arduous task, and one of the editors asked Dr. Rice if he had students who were willing to help.

I unknowingly jumped at the offer. It was an opportunity to contribute to the Valley’s largest newspaper. I was willing to do anything and everything to get my name out there, hoping that down the road it would help me get a job.

So I was given three candidates and a list of questions to ask them. I spent the following week scouring the web for their contact information, sending out emails, calling their secretaries and finding time to set up appointments to talk to them over the phone.

Two of the three candidates were cautiously responsive, and to my relief I was finally able to get what I needed from them. But I had absolutely no lead on the third candidate. I sent multiple emails a day asking for a phone number, leaving my contact information and repeatedly explaining my task. There was little time left until my deadline, and I had nothing from this guy.

I couldn’t sleep and stayed awake multiple nights worrying about what Dr. Rice would say to me when he found out I couldn’t complete his assignment. I was terrified he was going to complain about me to Fresno Bee editors.

So I decided to let him know ahead of time what was going on. I swallowed my pride and asked for his help. To my surprise, other students were having similar problems, and he was 100 percent understanding. He encouraged me to keep trying, and I did. I gave him what I had from the two candidates, and he sent me on my merry way.

But a few days later he called me into his office after class and shut the door. I swear the marching band drum line could have been practicing nearby the way my heart was pounding. I felt the blood rising in my cheeks, and even though it was the dead of winter I’m pretty sure Dr. Rice’s office was 90 degrees.

He asked for an update on the last candidate, and I told him that though I continued to try to contact him I still had nothing. He asked what channels of communication I used to contact him, and I explained the various email methods I tried.

Then Dr. Rice began telling me a story, and at first I didn’t understand why he was repeating it to me. Dr. Rice received a phone call the day before from the Bee editor.

One of the candidates on the list contacted the editor and said someone from the political party the Tea Party was contacting him trying to get campaign information from him and claiming to be gathering the info for the Bee. He thought it was a spy of some sort.

It turns out that spy was me, and that candidate was the guy I tried tracking down for the past few weeks. I sent out all those emails from my Fresno State email thinking that the university’s identity would give me some credibility. But the candidate, who was apparently a democrat, thought my innocent email username was affiliated with the sometimes-radical conservative Tea Party group.

He had no idea it was just a young college student who went by the nickname Bri and loved tea and who used that username since long before the Tea Party was around. The irony is that I was also registered as non-partisan and was never able to actually vote.

Dr. Rice quickly put together the pieces and realized what was going on. He chuckled about it a bit when I explained why I used that email address and that I was registered as non-partisan.

He told me not to worry about getting the info from that candidate anymore and reassured me that politicians were all a bit paranoid. He also advised me to create a new email account with a generic username. I followed that advice, though I did it a bit reluctantly.

Since then I’ve been extremely leery of using my Fresno State email address, and when I absolutely must use it, I feel a bit embarrassed about it. For whatever reason I feel perfectly comfortable leaving my Twitter and Instagram handles as that same username, but that email address just shames me now.

And as for the Tea Party, shame on them. That group ruined my email address! I had my dear username first, so I should rightly have first dibs. Isn’t that how it works? I may be able to laugh about the story now, but I’ll always hold a slight grudge against the Tea Party for ruining my beloved email address.

Brianna Vaccari is the assistant news editor at The Collegian. She lives in a little tiny farm town called Reedley, where she enjoys walking her weenie dog Roxy and eating tacos on the daily.­