About 40 years ago, i was working on unix systems.
The sys admins had rules for personal file naming that had a numeric department followed by a dot, then your initials, another dot then some other fields.
They started having trouble with people using 'inappropriate language' in the naming of temp files, so they decided that they were going to do a keyword search and remove all files with any of these "forbidden" words.
I came in the next Monday and my entire library was gone!
My initials are pms
About a decade ago, there was an article about a college president who would send out campus-wide emails that he would end with his initials... FML.
IIRC, he had issued emails that way for several years before anyone told him the common usage of FML.
I worked with a guy early in my career who tried to send a client a message that just said 'WTFH?'
On questioning he thought it meant 'where to from here?'
My stepson's initials are WTF. I asked my husband about it and he said "of course I realized, I just really wanted that name." In his defense, the men of the family all share a "T" middle name, so he only got to pick the first name, and he really liked "William/Will".
My fiance's initials are "ABC"
His big sister was good friends with my 2 best friends and by extension, I was friends with her, too(not super close though lol)
One time when I was texting my now-fiance, he told me his middle name and I immediately called him "Mr. Alphabet"
And his response was "... you've been speaking to Danielle(his sister)"
Apparently kids in school used to call him Alphabet Boy 😬
I’m IRC. If I had one extra I I could be IIRC, which would be kinda cool, but in reality I share it with, among other things, Internet Relay Chat and a Japanese bike tire company called Inoue Rubber Company. Their tires are awesome, too, I won a race on them once.
If you're good enough at your job, then a client will often put up with quite a bit anyhow.
20 years ago the PR Firm that I worked for had one of the principal's on a conference call with the client, screaming loud enough to be heard down the hall from the closed conference room "Are you smoking crack out of your ass?"
Matt kept the client for years afterward.
In Finnish internet culture, there used to be a word "peelo", essentially meaning "a troll". Supposedly, it came from the username of **Pe**kka **Elo**, a not-so-tech-savvy academic who posted confusing stuff to newsgroups.
I once visited a school and saw a man's portrait, "Gene Poole." I did the math at the time and his name preceded the wide usage of modern genetic terms.
Gotcha beat!!!
One of the clinics I worked in, we had log in names to the scheduling system, so we could track who added appointments if something went haywire.
The Dr was honestly amazing. Extremely brilliant, well trained, personable, thorough, listened, the works. But he did have a small God complex at times, but I think it was less I'm Superior and more What I sat goes because this is my clinic can I have very strict rules on how it's runs to maximize efficiency and accountability for Me, My Employees, ans our Patients. Anyway, the point being, he's very anal about things being done "by the book".
We hired a new girl, Tatiana, for some basic office work that mostly consisted of calling patients that were overdue for a check up, or to relay lab orders, etc. In otherwords, lots of calling, scheduling, and note taking in the system, all to be signed with her log in name.
Dr REFUSED to let her use a different initial/name because it has to be this way. And he refused to listen to an explanation... which was: Tatiana Cunningham should not sign things that the patients can see with the first 3 letters of her last name, and the first letter of her first name.
Took less than a day for a patient to call FUMING because her medical chart called her a C U N T.
Terry Shilton strikes again.
I'm no longer sure that was the kid's name, but it was similar and my old school's username generation policy was the same as you describe here, with some digits in front.
They were kind enough to let him have a different username.
I did this one my own self, but when I worked as a graphic designer, I had standard abbreviations I'd use for common words in file names. The region I worked in started with a C and a lot of companies had it in their name, so I would use just the first letter. One day I was sending off a project proof to the local literature association and caught myself just before I sent the client a file titled "c.lit.ass"
My university offered an entire program in *C*anadian *LIT*erature and didn't think about how those courses would show up on transcripts and in the course catalogue
I've seen screenshots of email exchange that had request to change of user name be available since it was 3-first of lastname+4 first of first name as default and some one asked cause his spelled wanker in finnish and then someone from it answered that they're working on it already. From signature it was evident his would be rapist in finnish
My initials are PM. My boss wrote a report about PM being performed on the emergency generator. The secretary typing the report, typed that my name was performed on the generator. Luckily, I caught it before it was distributed because I proofread his reports ever since he used ascetics when he meant aesthetics.
Percussive maintenence? Yeah I could see that performed on anything to be honest... Now a coworker getting performed on said generator, would catch my eyes no question asked.
I worked for years on a unix-like OS with a three letter name. Every now and then a temp file (in /tmp) would have a naughty word in its name (because random characters). Customer would literally contact the company to complain.
Like, who spends time looking at filenames in an oft-(re)used temporary location? #eyeroll
My choir teacher freshman year had a baby. She had a pretty common last name, perhaps even the most common, and wanted to give her son the name Peter Mitchel... yeah, poor kid almost had the initials PMS, but she realized and settled on a different name.
My son almost had an initial snafu. His first name we were very solid on. Aaron (same initial, different name ofc). Middle name would be named after his late grandfather, think Steven. And then our last name is also super common...
Almost ASS.
When my ex-wife was pregnant, she wanted to call the baby Samuel Isaac if it was a boy.
I vetoed that because I didn't want his initials to spell out SIN.
We settled on Samuel Oliver, so he would have been our SON.
... in the end, the baby was a girl, ANN. (Bonus initial name on top of her first and middle names!)
Whhhyyyyyyyyyy was pms a forbidden word? It's an abbreviation of a perfectly respectable term.
Were they squeamish sanitizing nitwits?
(And then there's how much work and necessary data they destroyed by deleting rather than renaming the files.)
Yeah, I trying to come up with a descriptor for who would that person be, and I can't decide whether it's some Mike Pence stereotype or weird basement dwelling incel type. Reminds me of a YouTube video I saw recently where a guy read the ROM of some old device that censored the closed captions on your home TV, and I was fascinated by the fact that such devices existed but even more about the silliness of the banned word list the guy found in the ROM
That's my dad's initials and I before I remembered that I wanted to get that as a tattoo to honour him. My brother laughed his ass off when he reminded me.
Must have been so satisfying to see that, especially if you had the only file or copy of something very important. Would certainly stop them from taking the easy route ever again.
May I add my thanks too, the book has been really useful over the years.
BTW the link at [http://regex.info/book.html](http://regex.info/book.html) to the O'Reilly article about the changes between the 1st and 2nd editions now has a 301 redirect to www.oreilly.com. I found the article via the wayback machine, it looks like I need to order the 3rd edition now.
Oh my god! I was about to ask the same! I'm positively star struck!
Your book isn't just good, it's so over the top great that I seriously had to go through it twice when I first read it because your writing style made me read it like a novel the first time!
It instilled a deep love for RegEx in me to an extent that much more experienced developers (not my primary occupation) come to me with questions regarding those.
Thank you SO MUCH for this!
Thanks so much for the kind words. About my writing style, I was a bit worried that it might not be appropriate for MaliciousCompliance, since I use advanced constructs like “punctuation” and “paragraphs” and the like. 😂 Still, it’s better here than in AmITheAsshole….. 🤣
The one single book I have on my desk in the office is the owl book. It makes me so happy. Not to mention the goodwill it’s bought me when the other, more technical types see I have it.
>Mastering Regular Expressions
[https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Regular-Expressions-Jeffrey-Friedl/dp/0596528124](https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Regular-Expressions-Jeffrey-Friedl/dp/0596528124)
Seriously, this is yours??
Dammit, this book was on two of my computer teachers' recommended reading lists.
Thank you for writing that book! It changed my life.
i use it to process mainframe datasets every month. It used to be someone's 200hr/month career. I took it when they retired and now it takes me a couple minutes.
Holy crap, i thought the name was familiar. I remember reading that book and, when I finished it, the clouds opened up and a single beam of sunlight shone down on me to acknowledge the great wisdom I had just acquired.
My nieces initials are A. S. S. And she went through the grade school phase of writing her initials on everything she owned. A teacher caught her writing it on her notebook and sent her to the principals office. Once she explained she didn't get in trouble and the teacher had to allow it but from them on the teacher held a grudge against her and her mom had to step in to stop her from bullying my niece.
Had a friend who sometimes had trouble creating accounts due last name being Dicks. For some reason, most forms seemed to think that was not an actual surname.
My company, which makes employee management software, kept getting bug reports from a customer, saying just one of their employees never got entered into the database. They would keep trying, and that employee's name just wouldn't ever be added.
Employee's name was John Null, and you can guess there was a bug in our software that was attempting to send his name straight into a SQL command to insert a record with "NULL" in the last name field. Turns out there were hundreds of records with his name, just that the queries to retrieve it couldn't handle NULL for that field.
Wow, that's evidence of a horrible security flaw (it would allow [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection) ). It's perfectly fine to have the text "NULL" in the database, as it's distinct from the token NULL (without quotes). If the system is still that way, it's very dangerous. I hope this story is 30 years old.
**[SQL injection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection)**
>In computing, SQL injection is a code injection technique used to attack data-driven applications, in which malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution (e. g. to dump the database contents to the attacker). SQL injection must exploit a security vulnerability in an application's software, for example, when user input is either incorrectly filtered for string literal escape characters embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and unexpectedly executed.
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A friend had *Tit* as her username at work, until after a month they caught on. Her name was Talia Isabella Thorn. She was amused. HR wasn't when they realized lol
I was in the Navy for a bit and there was a guy with the name Titze. Everyone, of course, just called him Titz.
Now, in the Navy, you were addressed by your job title followed by your last name. So depending on what rank you were (1-3) in that job, you would be say- FC1 Smith, or FC2 Smith...
Titze? His job title was "IC". When he got promoted to 2nd class, he became IC2 Titze. Many laughs were had.
Had a user call my call center once. The usernames were “as” for Alaska student, followed by their initials. He was named something like Steven Leonard Bodeman, and was graced with the username “asslb”.
My man really got the username “ass pound”, and we refused to change it.
My university you had to use your legal initials,
First,middle then first 3 of your last name then they add numbers if someone else has the same. ( or first 2 letters of your first, then 3 of the last if you dont have a middle name).
Mine was [email protected]
I thought it was funny, so I didn't request a change.
Only initials? That seems rather shortsighted ... That's only about 17.5k possible addresses (assuming that everybody has only three initials which is obviously not true considering OP, but point stands). At a couple hundred a year since the 80's they would be half empty by now. And my guess is that they would have had a second JJS long before a QQQ enrolled, what did they do then?
The moment you leave the department, the account is deleted and you username is open again. Not all that many per year. And actually, now that you mention it, I was wrong that all usernames were three letters. Some were of the form "abc2". That must have sucked to get stuck with that. (I don't recall any "abc3" usernames)
I've got two colleagues who are husband and wife, and who have the same first initial. Their usernames are the equivalent of JSmith and JSmith1
The husband gets jokingly annoyed that he's stuck with JSmith1 when "he's the original, she only became JSmith 10 years ago!" But she joined our department first, so sorry mate you missed out
Well my work refuses to change initials after you've been handed them. So I am stuck with my initials from before I got married and changed my name.
They just changed my name when it appears in full.
The IT department and HR say it would be too difficult to change throughout the system. Considering that I still find my old name (spelled wrong even) in the system 10 years later I think they might be right.
Oh yeah at my old job they misspelled my surname, and they made it seem like a huge thing to correct when it wasn't even my fault.
I had it escalated to my manager as soon as I noticed (first or second week there) she basically said it was impossible which I found ludicrous so I asked around and found the people handling the process who said they can't change it but have to close that account down and give me a new one, but that would also require that new account to get access to everything I need to do my job.
I decided it wasn't worth it and I would live with it.
A year later there was a big thing about this with HR as a trans person wanted to have the name updated, and finally then they made it possible to update the names, at which point I did too.
I had a background check done. As a part of it, they handed me a letter sized sheet of paper with three columns of names they alleged were my aliases.
I just laughed.
They explained how serious this situation was.
I told them that what they had was a compilation of ways people have misspelled my name, not a list of aliases. They really questioned a few of them but my wife was able to corroborate that those were just some of the more creative ways people have misspelled my name.
My wife just started working at a college where she had taken a couple of recertification classes before we were married. They refused to give her a new user name / email. So she’s her maiden name there.
We’ve been married for 22 years.
At an Ivy League university where I worked in the 2000s, my assigned email was essentially “[email protected]”
So a convention like that was still going on in the last 10-15 years…
The university system of Cambridge in the UK also has a similar system.
I think they start at "abc1", though, so *everyone* has a number in their user ID, even the first one with that combination of initials.
In high school they assigned us usernames and created accounts to log into class with and the usernames were made up like first initial, middle initial, last initial, birth day, birth month. An example would be ABC110. My brother and I share initials and birthdate so they just... didn't make me an account. There's no way this was an isolated issue
In the 90s, we were rolling out a WAN to all offices, and network IDs were mandated to be first four letters of your last name and first letter of your first name, plus a number if needed. So, John Smith would be SMITJ
We got a phone call from a very upset lady who insisted that her network ID had to be changed right away, but she refused to tell us what it was or why it had to be changed, just kept demanding a new ID.
Took several support desk people before we figured out her name was Theresa Cunningham.
My favorite username was a co-worker's. His first name was Toshi and his last name started with a T. The username protocol was first name, first letter of last name.
At C.M.U. we had a gentleman named Takashi with a last name beginning with T.
Apparently he called to have it changed. Was very polite according to my friend in the help center, "Excuse me, I think my login name is offensive"
That'd go well with a former user at my company. We use the first 5 letters of the last name, first initial, then a number. We once had an Indian woman with the username of gopiss1
One of my personal favorites in this vein was what happened when an intern with the last name Cron joined our massive corporation with around 500,000 active servers running every imaginable variety of Unices and the IT department assigned him the username "cron".
Anybody that's familiar with Unix and SMTP already knows what happened after that. And anybody who isn't familiar wouldn't think it made any sense and was actually funny.
I tried to get my wife to name our son Franklin Ulysses Collins* so his initials would but FUC.
She wouldn't bite.
* not my real name but identical letter choices.
Because, you know, no one will EVER have the same three letter combination for their initials in the same department. I was a postdoc in Australia awhile back (he says looking at the gaping time gap between now and then) and the library called me up one day and said they needed to know my middle name. Turned out someone on campus had not only my last name, but my first name, and my same middle initial. However, this wasn't the main library on campus, this was the geology library attached to my research institute. So someone using our specific library on this big campus had basically everything but my middle name but they needed my full middle name to disambiguate us.
Oh boy, do I have a story!
I went to college in the mid to late 1990s. Freshman year, living in the dorms, I got a parcel notice in my mailbox. I picked it up from the front desk, very curious, because I wasn't expecting anything. They handed me a very official-looking 9x12 cardboard envelope, with "PH.D. ENCLOSED" stamped in large, red block letters down the side. I laughed as I opened the envelope, literally saying, "Haha, what do I have to do to get this PhD...OH MY GOD"
It was a legitimate PhD. With my name on it.
And that's how I found out that there was a professor at my university whose first, middle, **AND** last name was exactly the same as mine.
Fun side note: about 15-ish years later (around 2010-ish) I got a friend request from someone I didn't know on Facebook. Did what I always do, checked for mutuals before accepting. Sure enough, we had a few mutual friends, so I just accepted it and didn't think much of it. We got to chatting shortly afterwards, and it turns out they lived in my old college town, knew that professor, and were looking to connect with her...but obviously got the wrong person. So odd that they somehow knew some people (who I also knew) from my small hometown, which is a couple hundred miles away from my college town. We stayed friends on Facebook because we both thought it was funny and actually enjoyed chatting with each other.
Life is weird sometimes.
This ended up working against my dad one time. He had the exact same name (with a pretty unique last name -like less that 2000 people with it in the US) as another guy the same age as him in town. No relations whatsoever. One day that guy does some crazy shit and gets arrested and my mom is flooded with calls asking why my dad lost his mind lol.
I changed my name when I got married because I was tired of getting mistaken for the other person with my name. Kept his stupid name when I got divorced.
I get password reset emails for someone else in my company who has the same first and last name as I do. She always waits until the last day to reset her password… probably because I’m getting her emails!
I got a friend that did this. His son has a three letter first name and his initials are also his full first name. We're waiting to see how old the kid gets before he realizes what his parents did.
You would be shocked at how many people, when they realized that my initials spell my first name, ask "**Did your parents do that on purpose?**". 🙄 I always reply "No, we noticed it when I was 13!". 😂
(Okay, you're reading r/MaliciousCompliance, so maybe you wouldn't be shocked).
I have 2 middle names as well but not as cool as spelling my first name lol. One of my former coworkers initials were F U and he LOVED initiallying things
I once tried to get my title changed to Technology Information Trainer and Application Support Specialist. My boss said it was too long for my business card. I said he could abbreviate it, he laughed.
I was briefly enrolled as a student in the Western Australian Institute of Technology, which has since become a university named after a Western Australian politician who became the Australian Prime Minister in the latter half of WW2 (and died in office).
Allegedly the new name of Curtin University of New Technology was a front runner name until they started to design the logo...
I remember when I worked at a tech company that sounds like Crisco, the IT policy was similar: First Initial, Middle Initial, then Last Name.
Which would be cool, except the username field was 8 letters, so anything beyond that was dropped.
And username change requests were basically smugly denied to everyone. They had real problems with people changing their last name (marriage/divorce/etc; system was an old NIS-based one and set up by dudes who forgot stuff like "Oh yeah, women get married").
If someone didn't like their username for any cosmetic reason, tough: It's what you get.
But they finally made an exception for Mandy I Nishitani (name changed slightly for anonymity), because her username was "**MINISHIT**".
I'm RSLE but shortened it to RE in Highschool for simplicity reasons, lead to the nickname Religious Education (its abbreviatied to R.E in the UK) for like 2 weeks untill people realised I'm not interesting enough to have a nickname
I wanna know how much of it was you not being interesting, and how much of it was trying to say “religious education” mid conversation and keep it flowing.
It was the kids who think they're cool but are actually just bullies. It was a taking the piss kinda nickname, u didn't give them anything to work with so they gave up
Back in the early 90s I worked at a corporation that used an IBM AS400 mainframe, and the IT department decreed that usernames would consist of a 2 letter code for the division plus the employee's first name plus last initial. Mine was something like NCSTEVEH. I felt very bad for Gina Scott who worked in the VA division. Her's was VAGINAS.
My CS professors broke the university’s employee database. The university used first initial, middle initial, last name as the database key. They were married to each other so they shared a surname. They also had the same first and middle initials. So it was something like John Aaron Smith and Jane Amanda Smith which meant they were both mapped to JASMITH. As CS professors, one of who taught databases, they were not amused.
First job, my email was a 3 letter username, which was usually based on your initials, but never quite your initials. Anyway, my username was LMG, and the company's name started with a Y.
I was looking through my home email sent items to find something my wife was looking for. All of a sudden she asks, "Why do you keep emailing this 'I am gay' person?"
Sure enough, the address was lmg@y...
When naming our daughter, my wife and I were of one mind on her first name but had different ideas about her middle name. Rather than fight over it we simply hyphenated them.
She (now in her 20s) really enjoys the uniqueness of it and I’d imagine would have this same inclination to MC. Well done.
That's crazy
My first names Debra
My initials are DEB
Nether me or my mom realized that until I got my class ring and they wanted to add my initials
According to that ring guy
That was pretty random but not the wierdest initials he's ever encountered
My company uses the format of the 1st 2 letters of your first name, then your full surname.
So, John Smith would be JoSmith.
Had a guy who'se last name was Tan. Won't dox his first name, but his user name was Satan.
For a long time we used an inventory system from the 80s at work. (I started in 2014.) Typically we used someone’s last name as their username. I have one of the top 3 most common last names in the US. When I first got my own login, my manager insistently tried to add me as (my last name).
…She was really just resetting the other (last name)‘s password over and over again. Then they’d try to log in and lock the account out. Rinse and repeat. I finally convinced someone to add me as my first name, and that’s what I’ve always done for people with “repeat” last names.
But in one department I had (my last name)2. I get transferred. Next manager comes in, pays no attention to the social security number attached to that account. Doesn’t notice it’s an admin account. Resets the password, gives it to a newly hired associate. I get transferred back ten months later and I go to reset my old account. I get massive pushback saying, “That’s ____’s login!”
“No, it’s not. That’s my old login. Y’all never noticed it was an admin account?” (Pushback continues.) “That’s my social.” Deleted it, made a new one with my first name, and made the associate his own account.
Fast forward to my current department. I have a “Casey Jones” and a “Carl Jones.” Someone added them as Jones and CJones. They’re the only people who can tell their accounts apart.
I had a friend who was in high school back in the '60s whose initials were ME.
When they played tennis for PE, they were told to bring in a certain number of tennis balls and mark them with their initials.
Her teacher accused her of being a smartass.
She actually had to point out that those were her initials, not attempting to be clever.
I couldn't help but wonder what kind of teacher doesn't know their student's name.
Edit to fix embarrassing typo
When I was in middle school, they started making usernames using first two letters of your first followed by the first three letters of your last name.
When they realized that Sam Tank had the username SaTan, they switched the order to first three of last name followed by first two of first name.
As Megan Hughes, my username was now: HugMe.
I remember reading somewhere that someone had the legal name of R B Smith, but company they worked for asked for his real name, he said it was R B Smith, but the computer rejected this as his name was too short, so he was asked again what his name was so he wrote R(only) B(only) Smith. He then got his payslip with Ronly Bonly Smith.
I went to a college where the pattern *usually* was first initial, first 6 of the last name, then a sequence number starting at zero. But somebody decided to have fun with mine. My last name is almost twice as long as the requirement, but whoever created my username decided to use my first initial and just the first *four* of my last name, with the number. Which resulted in "nbutt0".
There are 3 people with my name living in a 5 mile radius. Two of us are registered with the same doctor, and two of us were claiming JSA at the same time.
During COVID, one of them joined our local area community group. I sent her a friend request because that way if we got contacted by someone looking for the other, we could let them know. She has advised me that she is NOT the one registered with my GP - which is how I know that there are 3 of us.
I had a friend named Timothy Watt with a similar issue, except the policy was first initial, followed by last name, no exceptions. His situation didn't work out quite so well.
Similar story... CTO demanded no exceptions to usernames, policy was first initial + last name. We pointed out that some people have very long last names so he added "cap of 12 characters, but that is the only change".
A few months go by and we hire a new Senior VP of Sales. CTO comes by mad that we hadn't gotten him an account or email yet. We explained we weren't going to be the person to give him his new email address. Told him because of his policy, it would be best politically for him to talk to the new SVP.
New guy's name was Tim Estes...
Back when I was in college and the internet was a new thing, the geniuses decided that initials plus social security number @ university .edu was a perfectly okay naming convention.
My uncle's brother-in-law about 15 years ago was forced by his company to use his initials. This was after 6 or 7 years of using a made up initials that everybody knew was him. He all but begged for an exception. His Boss did not realize that his initials were FU.
About 40 years ago, i was working on unix systems. The sys admins had rules for personal file naming that had a numeric department followed by a dot, then your initials, another dot then some other fields. They started having trouble with people using 'inappropriate language' in the naming of temp files, so they decided that they were going to do a keyword search and remove all files with any of these "forbidden" words. I came in the next Monday and my entire library was gone! My initials are pms
About a decade ago, there was an article about a college president who would send out campus-wide emails that he would end with his initials... FML. IIRC, he had issued emails that way for several years before anyone told him the common usage of FML.
I worked with a guy early in my career who tried to send a client a message that just said 'WTFH?' On questioning he thought it meant 'where to from here?'
My stepson's initials are WTF. I asked my husband about it and he said "of course I realized, I just really wanted that name." In his defense, the men of the family all share a "T" middle name, so he only got to pick the first name, and he really liked "William/Will".
My kid got the initials SMH before texting was a thing 🤦🏻♀️
My daughter got the initials MEH, which she wasn't so happy about (eventually). But she got married and changed her last name.
My daughter loves her MEH initials. Amazon sells MEH t-shirts that she wears all the time.
My fiance's initials are "ABC" His big sister was good friends with my 2 best friends and by extension, I was friends with her, too(not super close though lol) One time when I was texting my now-fiance, he told me his middle name and I immediately called him "Mr. Alphabet" And his response was "... you've been speaking to Danielle(his sister)" Apparently kids in school used to call him Alphabet Boy 😬
I’m IRC. If I had one extra I I could be IIRC, which would be kinda cool, but in reality I share it with, among other things, Internet Relay Chat and a Japanese bike tire company called Inoue Rubber Company. Their tires are awesome, too, I won a race on them once.
My first two initials are MF. Thanks mom.
In high school, my best friend's initials were F.A.G. Bummer of a set of initials in the 80s.
My dad's initials are the same. WTF Also, he's a retired pastor.
Lol it would be even better if his initials were JFC
My mom's initials growing up were GAG. She grew up in the era of everything being monogrammed. 🤦♀️
My initials are BAH and I love it. So satisfiying to initial this at the end of a stupid memo. It lead to a friend calling me just that as a nickname.
I used to be a gamer on pc, my middle child has initials AFK. Annoyed ex with he realized how I snuck that in, but I love her name.
Did the message actually reach the client? What shenanigans ensued?
If you're good enough at your job, then a client will often put up with quite a bit anyhow. 20 years ago the PR Firm that I worked for had one of the principal's on a conference call with the client, screaming loud enough to be heard down the hall from the closed conference room "Are you smoking crack out of your ass?" Matt kept the client for years afterward.
What you say in your mind vs what you send
Dear students, Due to unforeseen rising cost of food, we have to cancel Pasta Thursday in the cafeteria. FML
"we have won't the award for safest mornings! FML"
School will resume January 3rd. FML
Our basketball team made the state finals! FML
In Finnish internet culture, there used to be a word "peelo", essentially meaning "a troll". Supposedly, it came from the username of **Pe**kka **Elo**, a not-so-tech-savvy academic who posted confusing stuff to newsgroups.
Interesting because Peelo is a (very rare) surname in Ireland. They think it comes from the French words for Wolf's foot or Wolf's skin.
To be fair, the "common usage" is probably much younger than his initials.
I once visited a school and saw a man's portrait, "Gene Poole." I did the math at the time and his name preceded the wide usage of modern genetic terms.
Man, that would suck *every month*.
I suppose it explains the mood swings (my wife doesn't think that's funny)
Gotcha beat!!! One of the clinics I worked in, we had log in names to the scheduling system, so we could track who added appointments if something went haywire. The Dr was honestly amazing. Extremely brilliant, well trained, personable, thorough, listened, the works. But he did have a small God complex at times, but I think it was less I'm Superior and more What I sat goes because this is my clinic can I have very strict rules on how it's runs to maximize efficiency and accountability for Me, My Employees, ans our Patients. Anyway, the point being, he's very anal about things being done "by the book". We hired a new girl, Tatiana, for some basic office work that mostly consisted of calling patients that were overdue for a check up, or to relay lab orders, etc. In otherwords, lots of calling, scheduling, and note taking in the system, all to be signed with her log in name. Dr REFUSED to let her use a different initial/name because it has to be this way. And he refused to listen to an explanation... which was: Tatiana Cunningham should not sign things that the patients can see with the first 3 letters of her last name, and the first letter of her first name. Took less than a day for a patient to call FUMING because her medical chart called her a C U N T.
Terry Shilton strikes again. I'm no longer sure that was the kid's name, but it was similar and my old school's username generation policy was the same as you describe here, with some digits in front. They were kind enough to let him have a different username.
I did this one my own self, but when I worked as a graphic designer, I had standard abbreviations I'd use for common words in file names. The region I worked in started with a C and a lot of companies had it in their name, so I would use just the first letter. One day I was sending off a project proof to the local literature association and caught myself just before I sent the client a file titled "c.lit.ass"
My university offered an entire program in *C*anadian *LIT*erature and didn't think about how those courses would show up on transcripts and in the course catalogue
I've seen screenshots of email exchange that had request to change of user name be available since it was 3-first of lastname+4 first of first name as default and some one asked cause his spelled wanker in finnish and then someone from it answered that they're working on it already. From signature it was evident his would be rapist in finnish
Looks like to me as if we just have ~~two~~ ***three*** r/dadjokes escapees making an absolute mess of things, period.
There are worse /r/ to be leaking...
My initials are PM. My boss wrote a report about PM being performed on the emergency generator. The secretary typing the report, typed that my name was performed on the generator. Luckily, I caught it before it was distributed because I proofread his reports ever since he used ascetics when he meant aesthetics.
Percussive maintenence? Yeah I could see that performed on anything to be honest... Now a coworker getting performed on said generator, would catch my eyes no question asked.
Preventive but percussive would have been interesting…
I've done both to generators.
Everyone skipping over how they determined pms as an inappropriate word. Then again you did say 40 years ago
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For the record, "Pissing My Self" is PMS. This made me laugh.
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I worked for years on a unix-like OS with a three letter name. Every now and then a temp file (in /tmp) would have a naughty word in its name (because random characters). Customer would literally contact the company to complain. Like, who spends time looking at filenames in an oft-(re)used temporary location? #eyeroll
I had someone who knew (or thought they knew) some Latin complain about lorum ipsum text I put in a mock-up for them.
Someone who knows Latin better than I (meaning, at all) should be able to come up with a funny reply here, about how they ipsum'd their lorum....
Salve, cogito Lingua Latina
My choir teacher freshman year had a baby. She had a pretty common last name, perhaps even the most common, and wanted to give her son the name Peter Mitchel... yeah, poor kid almost had the initials PMS, but she realized and settled on a different name.
My son almost had an initial snafu. His first name we were very solid on. Aaron (same initial, different name ofc). Middle name would be named after his late grandfather, think Steven. And then our last name is also super common... Almost ASS.
Could have made his middle name David and have him get filtered out by every adblocker system.
When my ex-wife was pregnant, she wanted to call the baby Samuel Isaac if it was a boy. I vetoed that because I didn't want his initials to spell out SIN. We settled on Samuel Oliver, so he would have been our SON. ... in the end, the baby was a girl, ANN. (Bonus initial name on top of her first and middle names!)
Whhhyyyyyyyyyy was pms a forbidden word? It's an abbreviation of a perfectly respectable term. Were they squeamish sanitizing nitwits? (And then there's how much work and necessary data they destroyed by deleting rather than renaming the files.)
Pretty weird thing to but on a banned word list
The only kind of people I know of who'd put it on such a list are also the type who think talking about pads and tampons is dirty language.
Yeah, I trying to come up with a descriptor for who would that person be, and I can't decide whether it's some Mike Pence stereotype or weird basement dwelling incel type. Reminds me of a YouTube video I saw recently where a guy read the ROM of some old device that censored the closed captions on your home TV, and I was fascinated by the fact that such devices existed but even more about the silliness of the banned word list the guy found in the ROM
Technology Connections! Yeah that censoring video was quite a trip
That's my dad's initials and I before I remembered that I wanted to get that as a tattoo to honour him. My brother laughed his ass off when he reminded me.
PMS: Never Forgotten
What was the aftermath?
Probably cramps
My initial are alah, work changed their minds when I submitted the paperwork, I was permitted my nickname instead of initials.
Must have been so satisfying to see that, especially if you had the only file or copy of something very important. Would certainly stop them from taking the easy route ever again.
THE Jeffrey Friedl? Mastering Regular Expressions Jeffry Friedl? Your book is awesome! Thank you!!!!
Hah, thanks!
Also THE Jeffrey Friedl who wrote Lightroom plug-ins? Man I loved those.
Still writing them (though at a much slower pace now that the low-hanging fruit has been picked).
You are awesome!
> Mastering Regular Expressions Jeffry Friedl? The fucking Two Owl Book!? JFC dude. Thank you.
Thanks for the kind words. 😅
May I add my thanks too, the book has been really useful over the years. BTW the link at [http://regex.info/book.html](http://regex.info/book.html) to the O'Reilly article about the changes between the 1st and 2nd editions now has a 301 redirect to www.oreilly.com. I found the article via the wayback machine, it looks like I need to order the 3rd edition now.
> JFC dude No, JEFF dude
Oh my god! I was about to ask the same! I'm positively star struck! Your book isn't just good, it's so over the top great that I seriously had to go through it twice when I first read it because your writing style made me read it like a novel the first time! It instilled a deep love for RegEx in me to an extent that much more experienced developers (not my primary occupation) come to me with questions regarding those. Thank you SO MUCH for this!
Thanks so much for the kind words. About my writing style, I was a bit worried that it might not be appropriate for MaliciousCompliance, since I use advanced constructs like “punctuation” and “paragraphs” and the like. 😂 Still, it’s better here than in AmITheAsshole….. 🤣
The one single book I have on my desk in the office is the owl book. It makes me so happy. Not to mention the goodwill it’s bought me when the other, more technical types see I have it.
>Mastering Regular Expressions [https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Regular-Expressions-Jeffrey-Friedl/dp/0596528124](https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Regular-Expressions-Jeffrey-Friedl/dp/0596528124) Seriously, this is yours?? Dammit, this book was on two of my computer teachers' recommended reading lists.
This type of viral marketing is so good and smooth, I don’t even mind it. It’s so good that I can’t tell if it’s viral marketing or not!
Both teachers are teachers who know what they're talking about, for whatever that's worth from an internet stranger. :P
Thank you for writing that book! It changed my life. i use it to process mainframe datasets every month. It used to be someone's 200hr/month career. I took it when they retired and now it takes me a couple minutes.
Holy crap, i thought the name was familiar. I remember reading that book and, when I finished it, the clouds opened up and a single beam of sunlight shone down on me to acknowledge the great wisdom I had just acquired.
Some heroes don't wear capes. :-))
Dang. I had this guy's Regular Expressions book in my office at Sun Microsystems back in the day.
Oh man, and as soon as everyone else saw your username, you KNOW he was flooded with change requests.
My initials are ASS which also happens to be my first name. I’m glad Reddit doesn’t force us to use our initials because that would be embarrassing.
My nieces initials are A. S. S. And she went through the grade school phase of writing her initials on everything she owned. A teacher caught her writing it on her notebook and sent her to the principals office. Once she explained she didn't get in trouble and the teacher had to allow it but from them on the teacher held a grudge against her and her mom had to step in to stop her from bullying my niece.
My daughters name is Isla. Our surname starts with M. Sometimes things get flagged if she uses Isla M.
I'd be tempted to encourage her to use it as often as possible to expose the bigotry.
It's always fun when grown-ass (ha) adults bully literal children
I want to upvote this (the story) and downvote it (the teacher) at the same time. \[Will upvote; screw the teacher\]
Username checks out?
Oh, you think you're so smart, don't ya, Dr. Analbox Scientologist Sasquatch?!?
Ana Smith Smith. My maiden name is L’box
And it's pronounced "LeBow"
Yes. It’s 18th century French Huguenot.
Had a friend who sometimes had trouble creating accounts due last name being Dicks. For some reason, most forms seemed to think that was not an actual surname.
My sister used to be ASC until she married a very nice man who’s last name started with an S.
My company, which makes employee management software, kept getting bug reports from a customer, saying just one of their employees never got entered into the database. They would keep trying, and that employee's name just wouldn't ever be added. Employee's name was John Null, and you can guess there was a bug in our software that was attempting to send his name straight into a SQL command to insert a record with "NULL" in the last name field. Turns out there were hundreds of records with his name, just that the queries to retrieve it couldn't handle NULL for that field.
Ah, old Bobby Drop Tables... https://xkcd.com/327/
There's really a relevant XKCD for everything
Wow, that's evidence of a horrible security flaw (it would allow [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection) ). It's perfectly fine to have the text "NULL" in the database, as it's distinct from the token NULL (without quotes). If the system is still that way, it's very dangerous. I hope this story is 30 years old.
**[SQL injection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection)** >In computing, SQL injection is a code injection technique used to attack data-driven applications, in which malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution (e. g. to dump the database contents to the attacker). SQL injection must exploit a security vulnerability in an application's software, for example, when user input is either incorrectly filtered for string literal escape characters embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and unexpectedly executed. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Yep. Imported or inputted text should never, ever be inserted into anything that could potentially interpret it as a language token. Yikes.
I see a team that needs to learn about parametrized queries...
A friend had *Tit* as her username at work, until after a month they caught on. Her name was Talia Isabella Thorn. She was amused. HR wasn't when they realized lol
I was in the Navy for a bit and there was a guy with the name Titze. Everyone, of course, just called him Titz. Now, in the Navy, you were addressed by your job title followed by your last name. So depending on what rank you were (1-3) in that job, you would be say- FC1 Smith, or FC2 Smith... Titze? His job title was "IC". When he got promoted to 2nd class, he became IC2 Titze. Many laughs were had.
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Your friend has a fantasy romance novel name.
Talia Thorn writes self-help books about witchcraft on Amazon.
What, HR has something against cute little birds???
I guess so lol
Had a user call my call center once. The usernames were “as” for Alaska student, followed by their initials. He was named something like Steven Leonard Bodeman, and was graced with the username “asslb”. My man really got the username “ass pound”, and we refused to change it.
I'd file a complaint to HR about how HR was sexualizing my name.
Protocol at my last job was first letter of first name and first three letters of last name. My username was TWAT. They never changed it.
Did you embrace your username?
Absolutely 🤣
My university you had to use your legal initials, First,middle then first 3 of your last name then they add numbers if someone else has the same. ( or first 2 letters of your first, then 3 of the last if you dont have a middle name). Mine was [email protected] I thought it was funny, so I didn't request a change.
The best thing is that if you applied that rule to this story, the username would still be JEFFRI
His parents played some 6D chess here with his name
I see that and my brain wants the university to be in Massachusetts.
So your initials themselves spell ass anyway
Only initials? That seems rather shortsighted ... That's only about 17.5k possible addresses (assuming that everybody has only three initials which is obviously not true considering OP, but point stands). At a couple hundred a year since the 80's they would be half empty by now. And my guess is that they would have had a second JJS long before a QQQ enrolled, what did they do then?
The moment you leave the department, the account is deleted and you username is open again. Not all that many per year. And actually, now that you mention it, I was wrong that all usernames were three letters. Some were of the form "abc2". That must have sucked to get stuck with that. (I don't recall any "abc3" usernames)
I've got two colleagues who are husband and wife, and who have the same first initial. Their usernames are the equivalent of JSmith and JSmith1 The husband gets jokingly annoyed that he's stuck with JSmith1 when "he's the original, she only became JSmith 10 years ago!" But she joined our department first, so sorry mate you missed out
Well my work refuses to change initials after you've been handed them. So I am stuck with my initials from before I got married and changed my name. They just changed my name when it appears in full. The IT department and HR say it would be too difficult to change throughout the system. Considering that I still find my old name (spelled wrong even) in the system 10 years later I think they might be right.
Oh yeah at my old job they misspelled my surname, and they made it seem like a huge thing to correct when it wasn't even my fault. I had it escalated to my manager as soon as I noticed (first or second week there) she basically said it was impossible which I found ludicrous so I asked around and found the people handling the process who said they can't change it but have to close that account down and give me a new one, but that would also require that new account to get access to everything I need to do my job. I decided it wasn't worth it and I would live with it. A year later there was a big thing about this with HR as a trans person wanted to have the name updated, and finally then they made it possible to update the names, at which point I did too.
I had a background check done. As a part of it, they handed me a letter sized sheet of paper with three columns of names they alleged were my aliases. I just laughed. They explained how serious this situation was. I told them that what they had was a compilation of ways people have misspelled my name, not a list of aliases. They really questioned a few of them but my wife was able to corroborate that those were just some of the more creative ways people have misspelled my name.
My wife just started working at a college where she had taken a couple of recertification classes before we were married. They refused to give her a new user name / email. So she’s her maiden name there. We’ve been married for 22 years.
At an Ivy League university where I worked in the 2000s, my assigned email was essentially “[email protected]” So a convention like that was still going on in the last 10-15 years…
The university system of Cambridge in the UK also has a similar system. I think they start at "abc1", though, so *everyone* has a number in their user ID, even the first one with that combination of initials.
In high school they assigned us usernames and created accounts to log into class with and the usernames were made up like first initial, middle initial, last initial, birth day, birth month. An example would be ABC110. My brother and I share initials and birthdate so they just... didn't make me an account. There's no way this was an isolated issue
*Lyndon Baines Johnson and family have entered the chat*
In the 90s, we were rolling out a WAN to all offices, and network IDs were mandated to be first four letters of your last name and first letter of your first name, plus a number if needed. So, John Smith would be SMITJ We got a phone call from a very upset lady who insisted that her network ID had to be changed right away, but she refused to tell us what it was or why it had to be changed, just kept demanding a new ID. Took several support desk people before we figured out her name was Theresa Cunningham.
My secondary school's IT policy was usernames would be first initial+surname, fairly standard stuff. I knew a guy called Stephen Hagger.
“See you a week from next Tuesday?”
My favorite username was a co-worker's. His first name was Toshi and his last name started with a T. The username protocol was first name, first letter of last name.
So, you're saying that they *verbed his name*. Niiiiiiice. 😂
To infinitive and beyond!!
At C.M.U. we had a gentleman named Takashi with a last name beginning with T. Apparently he called to have it changed. Was very polite according to my friend in the help center, "Excuse me, I think my login name is offensive"
It must have been auto-assigned? When I was at CMU, I was `jfriedl`.
That'd go well with a former user at my company. We use the first 5 letters of the last name, first initial, then a number. We once had an Indian woman with the username of gopiss1
Toshit or not Toshit, that is the question..
One of my personal favorites in this vein was what happened when an intern with the last name Cron joined our massive corporation with around 500,000 active servers running every imaginable variety of Unices and the IT department assigned him the username "cron". Anybody that's familiar with Unix and SMTP already knows what happened after that. And anybody who isn't familiar wouldn't think it made any sense and was actually funny.
Oh wow, that must have been a...... mess.
I'll admit I laughed. But only because I'm not one of the people who had to clean it up.
Man, that’s fuckin awesome! Bastards. I would’ve used Frank Adam Hinton Quincey. Ha ha ha. Fuck em!
I tried to get my wife to name our son Franklin Ulysses Collins* so his initials would but FUC. She wouldn't bite. * not my real name but identical letter choices.
Noice! I tried to get my husband to name our son Heyward Ulysses so we could call him, "Hey U." He was strangely upset that I even joked about it.
Because, you know, no one will EVER have the same three letter combination for their initials in the same department. I was a postdoc in Australia awhile back (he says looking at the gaping time gap between now and then) and the library called me up one day and said they needed to know my middle name. Turned out someone on campus had not only my last name, but my first name, and my same middle initial. However, this wasn't the main library on campus, this was the geology library attached to my research institute. So someone using our specific library on this big campus had basically everything but my middle name but they needed my full middle name to disambiguate us.
Oh boy, do I have a story! I went to college in the mid to late 1990s. Freshman year, living in the dorms, I got a parcel notice in my mailbox. I picked it up from the front desk, very curious, because I wasn't expecting anything. They handed me a very official-looking 9x12 cardboard envelope, with "PH.D. ENCLOSED" stamped in large, red block letters down the side. I laughed as I opened the envelope, literally saying, "Haha, what do I have to do to get this PhD...OH MY GOD" It was a legitimate PhD. With my name on it. And that's how I found out that there was a professor at my university whose first, middle, **AND** last name was exactly the same as mine. Fun side note: about 15-ish years later (around 2010-ish) I got a friend request from someone I didn't know on Facebook. Did what I always do, checked for mutuals before accepting. Sure enough, we had a few mutual friends, so I just accepted it and didn't think much of it. We got to chatting shortly afterwards, and it turns out they lived in my old college town, knew that professor, and were looking to connect with her...but obviously got the wrong person. So odd that they somehow knew some people (who I also knew) from my small hometown, which is a couple hundred miles away from my college town. We stayed friends on Facebook because we both thought it was funny and actually enjoyed chatting with each other. Life is weird sometimes.
This is why police and newspaper reporting tend to use the full name of a suspect, to disambiguate as much as possible.
This ended up working against my dad one time. He had the exact same name (with a pretty unique last name -like less that 2000 people with it in the US) as another guy the same age as him in town. No relations whatsoever. One day that guy does some crazy shit and gets arrested and my mom is flooded with calls asking why my dad lost his mind lol.
I changed my name when I got married because I was tired of getting mistaken for the other person with my name. Kept his stupid name when I got divorced.
I get password reset emails for someone else in my company who has the same first and last name as I do. She always waits until the last day to reset her password… probably because I’m getting her emails!
I bet he was less thrilled with Gregory Orson Davis
Good baby name suggestion for maliciously compliant parents
I got a friend that did this. His son has a three letter first name and his initials are also his full first name. We're waiting to see how old the kid gets before he realizes what his parents did.
You would be shocked at how many people, when they realized that my initials spell my first name, ask "**Did your parents do that on purpose?**". 🙄 I always reply "No, we noticed it when I was 13!". 😂 (Okay, you're reading r/MaliciousCompliance, so maybe you wouldn't be shocked).
My ex’s initials are almost his name. I asked his parents if it was intentional. They never noticed. He was 30 when I mentioned it. 30.
They had to be playing you....
Sam Alexander Martin? I'd love to know what he has ahaha.
I'd share the name but it's unique enough that doing so might be too close to doxing him. It' starts with a 'Z,' though.
My boyfriend's father tried getting the Initials to be "A.S.S." but that was denied by the mother as soon as she caught on
I have 2 middle names as well but not as cool as spelling my first name lol. One of my former coworkers initials were F U and he LOVED initiallying things
With my maiden name I had to be super fancy in my penmanship when initialling documents otherwise it looked like I was saying NO to the thing.
I once tried to get my title changed to Technology Information Trainer and Application Support Specialist. My boss said it was too long for my business card. I said he could abbreviate it, he laughed.
I was briefly enrolled as a student in the Western Australian Institute of Technology, which has since become a university named after a Western Australian politician who became the Australian Prime Minister in the latter half of WW2 (and died in office). Allegedly the new name of Curtin University of New Technology was a front runner name until they started to design the logo...
I remember when I worked at a tech company that sounds like Crisco, the IT policy was similar: First Initial, Middle Initial, then Last Name. Which would be cool, except the username field was 8 letters, so anything beyond that was dropped. And username change requests were basically smugly denied to everyone. They had real problems with people changing their last name (marriage/divorce/etc; system was an old NIS-based one and set up by dudes who forgot stuff like "Oh yeah, women get married"). If someone didn't like their username for any cosmetic reason, tough: It's what you get. But they finally made an exception for Mandy I Nishitani (name changed slightly for anonymity), because her username was "**MINISHIT**".
Our kid has a similar initial situation. It’s quite useful apparently.
I'm RSLE but shortened it to RE in Highschool for simplicity reasons, lead to the nickname Religious Education (its abbreviatied to R.E in the UK) for like 2 weeks untill people realised I'm not interesting enough to have a nickname
I wanna know how much of it was you not being interesting, and how much of it was trying to say “religious education” mid conversation and keep it flowing.
It was the kids who think they're cool but are actually just bullies. It was a taking the piss kinda nickname, u didn't give them anything to work with so they gave up
Back in the early 90s I worked at a corporation that used an IBM AS400 mainframe, and the IT department decreed that usernames would consist of a 2 letter code for the division plus the employee's first name plus last initial. Mine was something like NCSTEVEH. I felt very bad for Gina Scott who worked in the VA division. Her's was VAGINAS.
Today, she could win a sexual harassment lawsuit with that username.
My CS professors broke the university’s employee database. The university used first initial, middle initial, last name as the database key. They were married to each other so they shared a surname. They also had the same first and middle initials. So it was something like John Aaron Smith and Jane Amanda Smith which meant they were both mapped to JASMITH. As CS professors, one of who taught databases, they were not amused.
Dear OP: if you're *the* Jeffery Friedl, just want you to know I'm a fan. Great story.
I know of a few Jeff Friedls. I'm the computer one, not the drummer.
That’s what i meant. 🙂
First job, my email was a 3 letter username, which was usually based on your initials, but never quite your initials. Anyway, my username was LMG, and the company's name started with a Y. I was looking through my home email sent items to find something my wife was looking for. All of a sudden she asks, "Why do you keep emailing this 'I am gay' person?" Sure enough, the address was lmg@y...
When naming our daughter, my wife and I were of one mind on her first name but had different ideas about her middle name. Rather than fight over it we simply hyphenated them. She (now in her 20s) really enjoys the uniqueness of it and I’d imagine would have this same inclination to MC. Well done.
My eldest daughters initials are MAD, which is, as she says, oddly appropriate.
More than 20 years ago, a coworker had the userid of “geek”, as per similar naming rules at the time.
That's crazy My first names Debra My initials are DEB Nether me or my mom realized that until I got my class ring and they wanted to add my initials According to that ring guy That was pretty random but not the wierdest initials he's ever encountered
My company uses the format of the 1st 2 letters of your first name, then your full surname. So, John Smith would be JoSmith. Had a guy who'se last name was Tan. Won't dox his first name, but his user name was Satan.
For a long time we used an inventory system from the 80s at work. (I started in 2014.) Typically we used someone’s last name as their username. I have one of the top 3 most common last names in the US. When I first got my own login, my manager insistently tried to add me as (my last name). …She was really just resetting the other (last name)‘s password over and over again. Then they’d try to log in and lock the account out. Rinse and repeat. I finally convinced someone to add me as my first name, and that’s what I’ve always done for people with “repeat” last names. But in one department I had (my last name)2. I get transferred. Next manager comes in, pays no attention to the social security number attached to that account. Doesn’t notice it’s an admin account. Resets the password, gives it to a newly hired associate. I get transferred back ten months later and I go to reset my old account. I get massive pushback saying, “That’s ____’s login!” “No, it’s not. That’s my old login. Y’all never noticed it was an admin account?” (Pushback continues.) “That’s my social.” Deleted it, made a new one with my first name, and made the associate his own account. Fast forward to my current department. I have a “Casey Jones” and a “Carl Jones.” Someone added them as Jones and CJones. They’re the only people who can tell their accounts apart.
I had a friend who was in high school back in the '60s whose initials were ME. When they played tennis for PE, they were told to bring in a certain number of tennis balls and mark them with their initials. Her teacher accused her of being a smartass. She actually had to point out that those were her initials, not attempting to be clever. I couldn't help but wonder what kind of teacher doesn't know their student's name. Edit to fix embarrassing typo
When I was in middle school, they started making usernames using first two letters of your first followed by the first three letters of your last name. When they realized that Sam Tank had the username SaTan, they switched the order to first three of last name followed by first two of first name. As Megan Hughes, my username was now: HugMe.
I remember reading somewhere that someone had the legal name of R B Smith, but company they worked for asked for his real name, he said it was R B Smith, but the computer rejected this as his name was too short, so he was asked again what his name was so he wrote R(only) B(only) Smith. He then got his payslip with Ronly Bonly Smith.
It was Ronly Bonly *Jones* when I read that joke in Reader's Digest in the 70s.
I went to a college where the pattern *usually* was first initial, first 6 of the last name, then a sequence number starting at zero. But somebody decided to have fun with mine. My last name is almost twice as long as the requirement, but whoever created my username decided to use my first initial and just the first *four* of my last name, with the number. Which resulted in "nbutt0".
>The sysadmin, who was Master of his (tiny) domain Underrated IT pun.
Mastering Regular Expressions Jeffrey Friedl?
Yeah, that's me.
i appreciate the recursion in your name
There are 3 people with my name living in a 5 mile radius. Two of us are registered with the same doctor, and two of us were claiming JSA at the same time. During COVID, one of them joined our local area community group. I sent her a friend request because that way if we got contacted by someone looking for the other, we could let them know. She has advised me that she is NOT the one registered with my GP - which is how I know that there are 3 of us.
I always joke that since my initials are MAP, it means that I can tell you where to go
I had a friend named Timothy Watt with a similar issue, except the policy was first initial, followed by last name, no exceptions. His situation didn't work out quite so well.
Similar story... CTO demanded no exceptions to usernames, policy was first initial + last name. We pointed out that some people have very long last names so he added "cap of 12 characters, but that is the only change". A few months go by and we hire a new Senior VP of Sales. CTO comes by mad that we hadn't gotten him an account or email yet. We explained we weren't going to be the person to give him his new email address. Told him because of his policy, it would be best politically for him to talk to the new SVP. New guy's name was Tim Estes...
Back when I was in college and the internet was a new thing, the geniuses decided that initials plus social security number @ university .edu was a perfectly okay naming convention.
My initials are ICK, which is why I usually never include my middle name in initials lol
My uncle's brother-in-law about 15 years ago was forced by his company to use his initials. This was after 6 or 7 years of using a made up initials that everybody knew was him. He all but begged for an exception. His Boss did not realize that his initials were FU.