When I was at the University of Waterloo in the early 1980s, there was someone there who looked just like me. I found this out when I was walking down the campus ring road and a young man in a leg cast shouted at me, asking why I was being anti-social and ignoring him. I had to point out that I didn't know him. Also, I once went to the Ponderosa restaurant (this was a long time ago) and a woman there had to stare at me for some time before she realized that I was not her chemistry lab partner.
I never met my lookalike but someone I know did - she had to look at him from several angles before she was convinced that he was not me. I wonder what happened to him - does he still look like me, or does he look like Will Ferrell? I'll never know.
Every now and again, I've searched for my own name on the Internet. I think everybody does this at least once - I believe it's called "ego surfing". The first times I did this, I discovered a few Dave Tills or David Tills: there was a professor of computer science in England, somebody who played in a band with John Wetton, and a Malaysian easy listening artist. His CD was available for sale online; I would have bought it but I didn't trust the website with my credit card number.
Over the years, there have been two Dave Tills that have been connected to my life more than the others. I found out about the first one in the late 1990s: I was the only Dave Till in the Toronto phone book, so I got calls for another Dave Till. Over a period of a few months, I found out some things about him:
Most of the calls to the wrong Dave Till went to my answering machine, but I answered one once. A dry-sounding man with a British accent asked for Dave. When I said I was Dave, he asked for Dave Till. By then, I knew what was happening and I said I was Dave Till, but not the one he was looking for. I recall him being peeved. A recent search turned up this Internet Movie Database entry - I think this is my namesake. I also found a biography of him. He seems to have had a good career.
The other Dave Till that I have run into lately first appeared in my Twitter feed. For some reason, I started getting references to obscure electronic dance music links. When I investigated, I figured out that there was an electronic dance artist named Dave Till; "Till" was his stage name and his real surname was something longer. I had the Twitter handle @davetill already, so he had to take @davetillmusic. People who didn't know this included my Twitter handle in their references.
I eventually updated my About paragraph on Twitter to say that I was a technical writer from Toronto, not an electronic dance music artist from (I believe) Belgium. (I left Twitter shortly after Elon Musk bought it and turned it into X; this was one of my good life choices.)
A brief search just now turned up a Facebook page for this Dave Till, which was last updated in 2024. There's also a Spotify artist page and an Apple Music artist page for him. I've listened to some of his stuff - it seems okay but I am not really a fan of electronic dance music.
April 2026