I'm sick of my name

[NecessaryCatharsis]

I have an extremely common name. This is good - I rarely get asked how to spell it - and bad - I went to 4 schools for grade school & high school, there was between 1-4 other people with the same first/last name as me at each.

Today the kid doing labour/gopher/cleaner for the carpenters shared a last name with me. How do I know? Every three minutes, all day long, someone would yell 'MYNAME' and I would turn around 'What?' and then realize they were not talking to me. I don't think I'm going back there tomorrow, but if I am I may be able to let you all know how long it takes for someone to be conditioned to ignore people yelling their name nearby.

[Tama]

I had this problem when I worked at Malmart. There were four Tamas on the front end alone.

They ended up just using our surnames.

[MadMike]

I was in a class once with three other Mikes. And the teacher, in his infinite wisdom, seated us all close to each other. It was kind of comical, actually. Every time the teacher would call "Mike", either all of us would answer, or none of us would.

[Seshat]

My name was 'Kay'. A letter of the alphabet, and also a syllable of 'OK' - and the syllable people use when they shorten it.

The final straw was when I was in the school band, rehearsing for the annual musical. We were sitting in the 'orchestra pit' (ie, a place near the stage where some of the benches had been cleared away), and one of the boys who helped run the hall was checking that he'd labelled all the rows correctly.

Do you know how many letters of the alphabet are a plosive (t, b, k, etc) followed by the syllable 'ay'? I do.

Do you know how many times in a day people say 'OK'? I do.


I changed my name after I turned 18. It's still a reasonably common name, but not one of the most common - and NOT a commonly used phrase, nor a letter of the alphabet.

[bainsidhe]

Interesting. In my case, I wish I had a common last name. Don't get me wrong, I like having a "unique" last name, but I hate the fact that you can find out a lot of personal info with ease. If you google my last name, you can immediately find out all about me, just by skimming the first page. Why? Because there's only 7 people in the US with my last name, all family. This makes me especially nervous about using social media, because of just how easy it is to pull up my information.

This is the age of the internet. I wish I was born with a common last name.

[notalwaysright]

I went to school with countless girls named Kelly, or Melissa or Jessica. Same with Alex or Tim. I'm grateful to my parents for giving me an uncommon name that is still not something people mispronounce or misspell. I don't plan on kids, but if I did I'd make sure it wasn't something too common, but not something too hard.

And just because it's a common name doesn't necessarily mean it's spelled the way you'd think.

[Tama]

Don't I know it. My name is just...a playground for people wanting their precious snowflakes normal name to be made "unique."

Tamae and Dama and Daema...

Well it's not my name but you get the idea.

[Kal]

I remember, back in high school, there were two kids with the same names - christian name and surname. So they got put in the same tutor class to reduce confusion, or at least mean that any letters would come to the right room, if not the right person.

[mjr]

We had a few interesting ones when I went to school. We had a couple of sisters who had rhyming names, but weren't twins (I don't think).

We had another couple of sisters. One was named after a famous Disney deer, another was named after a product that bees make. Also a brother and sister named Harry and Carrie.

We had a few of Eastern-European surnames at my school, too. Czech last names, some of them.

[Teysa]

While there were quite a few kids with variations of my name when I was a kid, I didn't meet anyone with my exact name until 9th grade. When I worked at the pizza place, someone from one of the other stores had my name. Fast forward several years and one of the cruise ship reps had the same name. So, I would say that my name is fairly uncommon. I'm even the only person with my first and last name on Facebook.

[BPFH]

I was in a class once with three other Mikes. And the teacher, in his infinite wisdom, seated us all close to each other. It was kind of comical, actually. Every time the teacher would call "Mike", either all of us would answer, or none of us would.

One of my math classes in junior high had three Todds and four Matts, so I've experienced this phenomenon first-hand.

[cindybubbles]

You think high school was bad? Google your own name and see how many results it can find for you.

I've got at least 25 LinkedIn profiles of people with my name or a variant, one doctor, one obituary, a Twitter profile (other than my own), and a Miss Universe Malaysia contestant!

[Kittish]

My first name is super common, last name is somewhat common. You won't find me with google, though, at least not in the first six pages or so (that's as far as I looked). You will find a number of other people with the same name.

When I was married, brother in law's wife used the same first name as me. One day we're all at the 'rent's and some guy knocks on the door and asks for Mrs. Lastname. There were three of those in the house, so of course we ask which one? Uhhhhh... Mrs. Firstname Lastname? Right, which one? The look of confusion on the guy's face was priceless.

[raudf]

I have a unique maiden name and everyone in the US with that last name is related to me. No one outside the "family" knows how to spell or pronounce it, even though it's only FIVE letters long and sounds exactly as it is spelt. Now, combine this with a first name that was more common when I was a kid and you wind up with every damn shortening of my first name and complete avoidance by teachers on saying the last name.

And this is why I hate my first name and got married to someone whose last name is more common and easily pronounced.

[wolfie]

You know you're dealing with common names when a couple shows up to apply for a marriage license: David Smith (son of John and Jane Smith), and Susan Smith (daughter of John and Jane Smith), and the clerk doesn't bat an eye, assuming (correctly) that they're 2 different pairs of John and Jane Smith.