When I worked for my university’s Student Computing department, usernames were all “up to 7 characters from surname + the first letter of their given name.” So there were plenty of stories about bad usernames that the admins would have to fix.
The best one for me, personally, was when I helped a student out whose surname was Takashi and his first name started with a T.
It didn’t help that no one at Oregon State considered the ‘www’ when they chose the school’s first domain name. So that turned into takashit@www.orst.edu
Edit to add: This was in the mid-90s. That was that guy’s first and (at the time) only email address.
Oregano State used “www” in their email domain? I totally buy it, but in the “what kinda non tech manager decided on that” kinda way
By the end of the first term, www.orst.edu became ‘osu.orst.edu’ (www still worked, but nothing linked to it). Then over the summer everything was changed to oregonstate.edu.
Ohio, Oregon, and Oklahoma are gonna have to brawl over who gets the OSU name someday.
You can’t make this shit up.
That does indeed sound like the wwworst administration.
Wow, the kid named finger
Reminds me of Education Queensland’s approach to creating usernames. First letter of the first name, first four letters of the surname. Followed by a sequential number.
I nearly lost it when I saw a staff member by the name of something like Sharon Laverton (names slightly anonymised, but odds are someone else by that name exists) have an email that not only started
slave, but also ended with a number for that final dehumanising touch.slave384@eq.edu.au.RIP her inbox.
Megan Bennett Finger
Central Washington UniversityMs. Finger,
Per your request, we have converted your email address to our alternate format: [Surname][Middle Initial]Last (to denote the spelled-out name)[First 2 letters of forename]. Your new email address is now fingerblastme@cwu.edu and your case is now closed.
Thank you,
CWU SupportI love this
When I handled these, I always checked for poor taste collisions. If found, granted an immediate exception.
She would be Megan.finger@.
Fuck the old systems with hard character limits.
Firstname.lastname@address is pretty much a universal standard, why would you use anything else?
You’d think that every place should do this, but for whatever reason a lot of them do weird shit like in the OP. Not sure why that is. Maybe they are afraid of the characters running too long or something like that for people with long names?
Edit: Wow just reading through some of the real generated emails in this post is wild lol!!
My wife’s name sounds like Annette Alonso (not her real name - this one is made up) , and her new employer had standardised emails the first two letters from the first name and the first two letters from last name. You bet she was furious with anal@company.com, given that she was going to be working with clients. She ultimately got it changed to anna@company.com
It even tells people where they can do it!
This scheme makes almost every username sound awful. They new what they were doing.
Thank you for the arrow I would’ve never guess myself
