In first grade, we were given a pointless busywork assignment to test our handwriting skills. I hated writing (I did not have good physical control of the pencil) so I wrote the shortest possible answer to all of the pointless questions. The first question was "What is your favorite number?" I answered "1" My teacher, looking at answers like "1", "red", "a dog", "No.", etc, said "1 can't be your favorite number. Pick a harder number to write." I spitefully picked "11". (Too bad I couldn't write Japanese at the time -- for the same amount of work I could have picked 10.)
In middle school, right when I was first getting involved with online services, my best friend was a Puerto Rican. He hated the hard "k" sound in Patrick and called me "pato" for about a day, but laughed at his oh-so-clever joke, so I asked him to change it. I can't stand "Pat." (There was a movie about a gender-ambiguous character named Pat that year. It was middle school and I was a geek, you can do the math.) He then proposed "Patio." We paled around often enough that it stuck with my family. When I needed a disambiguating number for e.g. AOL email addresses or Warcraft 2 handles, I naturally went with my favorite number, 11.
I'm patio11 on just about every service that I use which I don't mind associated with my real name.
That reminds me of a first-grade story. One morning I had a flash of brilliance and realized that if I didn't have an eraser, I would never make another mistake in my life. We had those big fat red first-grade pencils, so I spent all day making really dark circles and then erasing them as completely as I could. I was really proud of myself at the end of the day when my eraser was completely gone.
I was really confused for a while when I made my next mistake.
I'm left-handed and spent my learning-to-write time in school attempting to form the letters while holding the pencil differently than everyone else. I could already write and to pass the time I decided to find out whether it was possible to do it differently than the way it "should" be done.
I still don't quite understand why the teacher wasn't thrilled when I discovered that there are indeed multiple successful ways to hold a pencil. She looked at me blankly when I announced my success and said "Yes, but those are not the right ways."
edit (to avoid comment spam): Thanks for the info!