I was looking for some mind map software today for the Mac, when I encountered this website. In itself nothing special: Some guy I’ve never met before wrote some software and used the picture of a hand as its icon. Nothing special, until I had a closer look at the icon itself. Yup, it is my hand.
How do I know? Well. Aside from obvious similarities such as the ratio between fingers and palm and lines in my palm, there’s two things that make my hand pretty unique. First is the slight curving inwards of my pink finger and outwards of my middle finger. Especially the last digit of my middle finger is just plain crooked. But this is where it gets cooler. I was born with polydactyly, which literally means “many fingers”. Long story short, I was born with 12 fingers and 12 toes, which is a few in a thousand genetic deformity. Now, because the “extras” weren’t functional (no bone present), they have thankfully been removed shortly after birth. It did leave me with a slight indentation and bumpy scar at the base of my pinky, which is fairly visible even on this icon.
So, how the hell did it end up there? Well, when I was still in college (somewhere in 1999 or so), I made a website on one of the university servers for an American girl. It wasn’t a romantic gesture as you’d envision it, but it was meant as some sort of support during a time when she felt really alone. For this, I scanned my hand on a damn good Agfa scanner (a shame they don’t make that kind of quality anymore) and put it in a web page on a black background, so that (if viewed on a 15″ monitor), the size of it would exactly match its real life size. So, if she touched the monitor with the hand on the screen, it would be the closest we’d come to touching each other. This page was supposed to be “our secret” and wasn’t linked from anywhere, but must have been spidered by Google at some point nevertheless. And, even though I left college pretty soon after that, it must have stayed up for a while. And, considering the size and the quality, I guess it must have gotten a pretty high hit when looking for hand pictures.
Now, here’s where it gets even weirder. This hasn’t been the first time I’ve discovered my hand like this. About a year ago, I saw it show up in the banner of some palm reading website (which I was less happy about, mac software is definitely cooler). I contacted the people of that site, but I guess they couldn’t appreciate my excitement.
In general I don’t mind: I put it online. It does make me wonder though: Where else has the image of my left hand been used at some point? Other web sites? Maybe a printed poster left and right? Maybe…