If you look up Special K in the wikipedia you get four distinct references:

The article Special K describes the breakfast cereal manufactured by Kellogg Company; several additional things have adopted this name, including:

• Special K, a slang term for the drug ketamine.
• Special K, a rapper and original member of the Treacherous Three.
• Special K, a song by rock band Placebo.
• Special K, a female rapper from Northern California
• Special K, a pro wrestling stable in Ring of Honor.

So how did I end up with that moniker?

Here’s the story

In 1998 I was working at SGI (aka Silicon Graphics) in the Kernel group. At the time a Director of Engineering had gone off with a bunch of our principal engineers to go and architect a brand new operating system to address the fundamental buisiness bind that SGI was in.

I was at the time, junior flunky number #456 working on this project.

Since the Director had little faith in my abilities (and I would to given the group I was hanging with), he assigned me to one of the senior engineers.

The engineer and I were supposed to be working on this core testing platform for the new OS (called TestOS).

So in one of our staff meetings, the following happened:
Director: Your status?

Kostadis: Got TestOS to boot.

Director: Good. What was the other guy’s contribution?

And for reasons that I still don’t understand I said:

Kostadis: He supervised me.

That set off the director who ripped into the senior engineer. The senior engineer then decided that I had shown too much mouth and he had to get back at me. So the next morning, upon arrival at work, I discovered that all of my bugs had been re-assigned to “specialk@sgi.com”.

Since all bugs at SGI went to one newsgroup, that the entire company monitored, it was equivalent to telling the world kostadis’ nickname is specialk@sgi.com.

For years I fought against the nickname. But as we get older some things that were not funny in the past become funny again…