AFTER MANY long years of standing in line waiting my turn, I have at last become a victim of discrimination. If I can get the lawsuit in quickly, the letter "W" may yet make me a millionaire, at least before taxes.

Until now, the problems have been my color (barroom pallor white, except when I spend too long in the sun or get caught with my fly open), race (Anglo-Saxon, except for an occasionally nasty streak of Dutch) and religion (I show up in church a couple of times a year, generally for funerals).

The result has been that, try as I might, victimization by discrimination has eluded me. In fact, it might be said that I have been discriminated against by not being discriminated against. If you know what I mean. I'm not sure that I do.

Anyway, lo and behold, it turns out that I, too, like millions of other folks, have been victimized all my life, and I didn't even know it. For lack of a better term (and surely some phraseologist will come up with one, if the money is right), it could be described as discrimination by alphabet.

I was perusing one of the local newspapers and was somewhere between growing concern over a scientist's prediction that the universe could turn into blackberry jelly and a report that Nottingham, England, a place known as the "city of gloom," was wondering why its solar-powered parking meters had quit working, when it struck me:

I am a victim of abecedarianism - tyranny of the alphabet, a theory suggesting that the ABCDs of this world have a significant edge over folks whose names begin in the WXYZ region when it comes to fame, money and success in life.

Pam Woodall, economics editor of a magazine called Economist, cites the cold facts: 26 of George W. Bush's predecessors as President had surnames in the first half of the alphabet against just 16 in the second half.

Or take the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger is far richer and more famous than the other surviving members - Richards, Wyman, Watts and Wood. Or five of the richest men on the planet - Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Paul Allen, Larry Ellison and Karl Albrecht...

There's a poignant thing. If Bill Gates had been born Bill Zygote, I might have been spared my daily torment of corrupted Windows, crashing computers and endless repetitions of my victimization by that undying mystery of cyberspace, Error 404.

As Pam Woodall puts it, the rot sets in at a young age. "At the start of the first year in school," she says, "teachers sit pupils alphabetically from the front, to make it easier to remember their names."

And it all came rushing back to me, one of life's "W's," forever at the back of the classroom at Christenberry Junior High School, nearsighted to boot, and needing the Hubble telescope to glimpse the algebraic mumbo-jumbo on the blackboard.

(To be fair, the teacher, Mrs. Rush, did move me to the front - actually to within a foot of the blackboard. It didn't help. The algebra thingies that looked like furry, indecipherable squiggles from the rear of the class now looked like very sharp, six-inch high indecipherable squiggles from my new viewing spot.)

Actually, about the only good thing to be said about sitting at the back of the classroom, particularly if you are a pubescent young male and your overactive imagination centers on the opposite sex with an inevitable physiological reaction, you have far less chance of having to stand up and recite while the rest of the class stares at your crotch.

Finally comes graduation night, and more of the same. The occasion gets under way with great hoopla as the ABC's proudly step forward to collect their diplomas and honors. But by the time they get to the W's, everybody is bored rigid, sliding into catnaps or slyly at work on crossword puzzles to try to keep their eyes focused.

(Which reminds me. Our three cats are Ali, Currant Bun and Angel Gabriel, and we - or at least I, and I'll tell Elizabeth about it later - have chosen names for the next three arrivals: Aam, Aaron and Aardvark. When it comes to alphabet tyranny, you can never be too careful.)

It goes on though life, says Pam Woodall. "Shortlists for job interviews, election ballot papers, lists of conference speakers and attendees - all tend to be drawn up alphabetically." By WXYZ time, the jobs are gone, the election lost, the conference speakers chosen and everybody's gone home, so to speak.

I did get my starting job in journalism on the first try at my hometown newspaper, but that was because my predecessor had somehow managed to write a story about a councilman who "stepped into the restroom at Union Bus Station Friday night and sh-t himself to death."

He hastily departed for a posting in the Midwest, and The Journal hired me more or less in desperation. Somebody had to take the obituary calls from the funeral homes, and it paid $42.50 a week.

It's Pam Woodall's theory that all this back-of-the-classroom and bottom-of-the-pecking order business leaves us WXYZers with battered psyches. "We are all used to seeing lists in order of merit, so those who see their names continuously at the bottom could have low self-esteem," she notes.

Maybe so. I did, mind you, reflect upon this once or twice, back in my junior year at Central High School, and I reminded myself that at least my first name began with "A," which should be some sort of morale booster.

It wasn't. In my case, the "Al" is short for "Alvin," and back in the 1950s, it wasn't particularly great to have the same name as a falsetto-singing chipmunk. You don't know what low self-esteem is until your best pal starts singing, "Alvin has a Hula Hoop..."

Thought for the Week: Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.

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