It is kind of a long story, but the one I tell most often. When I was a child I was obsessed with animals and basically lived at my local zoo. I went to Zoo school, I became a volunteer Teen Zookeeper, and once I turned 16 I was hired to walk and give rides on ponies, horses, and camels. There was a particular summer that was a little strange. All of the children started to become terrified that the camels were going to spit at them. I didn’t really understand why. While the llamas spit, in all the years I had been at the zoo I had never seen a camel spit and it made the summer much harder. It was difficult to convince a macho parent that putting their terrified, crying, flailing child on a 1000 lb animal was not the smartest idea. Anyhow, the summer came and went. I forgot all about the weird surge in camel phobia until later that year. It was extremely late at night at a cast party for a high school production of Damn Yankees I had played the lead in and someone decided to put on the movie Aladdin. Within the first few minutes they show a camel spitting at someone. Then it clicks. All the kids saw this movie when it came out over the summer, and now kids think camels are going to spit at them. It was the reason for my summer grief and I decided that I hated the movie and was going to be sure everyone else hated the movie too. I went on a rant. I said the movie was racist because the good characters had big round eyes while the bad characters had more ethnically distinct characteristics. I said the jokes wouldn’t be funny in 30 years. I said the cat(tiger) was behaving more like a dog. Basically anything I could complain about for 35 or 40 minutes I did. Until this girl who had been drinking sex on the beach all night (don’t do it kids) turned to me and blurted out “Shut up…..you sound…..like a duck ... .Quack, quack, quack.” Everyone thought it was hilarious. Jaime Hartke (she once made me promise to always give her credit so I always do) gave me my name. Duck stuck and I have been called Duck ever since.