7d ago

fingerme

43 comments

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.
  
  how else would you know that they're the wwworst?
- I worked at a place a decade ago where I worked with schools in my country. An admin at a school called; her name was Barbara. Her last name was, and I’m not making this up, “Adcock”.
  Her E-mail was “badcock@school”
  I couldn’t help but to think “what if her name was Rachel? Or Deborah? Or Sandra?”
  
  Or Hannah
- You can’t make this shit up.
- That does indeed sound like the wwworst administration.

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.

Wow, the kid named finger

Corrected to .....
fingermeg@cwu.edu
Optional to ...
fingermegan@cwu.edu
- "I don't understand, that user keeps asking me to fix their email, and they're more angry each time!"

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?
  
  My work does first initial last name, which even internally results in tons of jsmith2@company.com.
  I don't really get why I can't just choose from a list of accepted combinations or something.
  
  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!!
  
  They are probably just trying to keep consistency between an AD instance and Exchange or something like that. Or just laziness.
  When we generate new user accounts we run a script that generates an email (so we don't have to manually do it). It gets generated with the username of the individual which in our case would be first initial, last name. Then another alias gets generates to first.last@x.whatever and is set as primary. While the username@x.whatever is left as an alias, but would still technically work if you emailed it.
  If a username already exists we will use the first and second letter of the first name and then the last name, etc.
  In the above I mentioned consistency and laziness, but there is also another side, and that is your user base. If you are servicing hundreds of thousands of people or just a ton in general, consistency is very much preferred. Try having to explain to an end user that their login is simply "username" for their computer, but their email is "first.last@x.whatever" oh and let's go ahead and loop in Azure SSO so now their software license login and login for all these other portals is "username@x.whatever".
  You end up with a mass of confusion. Sometimes simplicity is best when it's possible.

Megan Bennett Finger
Central Washington University
Ms. 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 Support
- Finger bang bang into your life!
  Seriously though, my experience with requesting a name change from the university IT dept. has been very positive.
- I love this

There was an Alan Buser at my last company…yep, abuser@company.com. Not only did he have to live with that as his email, but he would occasionally receive reports that definitely should have gone to HR. Eventually they let us alias it to alan@company, but as far as I know when I left he was still getting anything sent to abuser@company too. He was such a nice guy too!
- Reminds me of the search suggestions I've seen about suggested search topic:
  "Jalen Hurts Fiancee"
  First thought was that this Jalen person must have gone all Sean Diddy on his fiancee. Then I found out that his last name is Hurts.

RIP her inbox.

Worked at a company where emails were first initial then last name. So there was a guy named Shawn Lutz so his email was SLutz@email.com
It seemed I was the only one really aware of that since he almost never sent emails
- Best one I got is c. ries, cries@company.com lol
  
  I had a P. Hart who was stuck with phart@company
- We had a slutski here, too 😂

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
- I think "anal@company.com" is pretty unique and easy to remember.
  Best Regards, Tiriakos Tsoprano

As Nikita Grigorev, I was given an allcaps username made out of first two letters of my name and two letters of surname. I complained, but I was told that the process is a process. They changed for the ANAL guy before, but not for me. So I was called basically a slur for two years

I read that as @uwu
- :3

OK, if you insist, I will.

<>

    
$ finger me
Login: me                               Name: mikhail esteban
Directory: /sdf/udd/m/me                Shell: /bin/ksh
Never logged in.
New mail received Sat Feb 22 13:32 2025 (UTC)
     Unread since Tue Feb  4 07:35 2025 (UTC)
No Plan.