“This never happened to the other fella …”

One of the joys of having a common name like mine is that people rarely have to ask how it’s spelled.

One of the less-than-joys is that, in a world of userids and e-mail addresses, I have a lot of company out there …

So I got an e-mail forwarded to me third-hand today from one of our compliance auditors in another office, unhappy about an explanation I gave on an expense item from my Tennessee trip. Fine, I guess that’s what they get paid for, whatever …

The problem was, the guy had sent it to the wrong e-mail address. He’d glanced at my name on the expense report (“HILL, DAVID C.”), and sent e-mailed his query to “Hill, David.” Fine, save that …

… well, that’s some relatively recent schlub working at a job site out of our Houston office. This guy gets a not-insubstantial amount of my mail, which ought to have been sent to “Hill, Dave.”

Heck, the CIO, for whom I work, has made that mistake. Yeesh.

This is not something that lends itself to easy solution. First off, I’ve had this e-mail address for — well, almost since they’ve had e-mail at the company. There was a brief time when I (for the sake of differentiating) had “Hill, Dave (Denver)” as the global address listing. I also, very briefly, tried, “Hill, Dave C.” I could change it to “Hill, David C.,” but that would only confuse the folks who already know how to reach me.

And those sorts of work-arounds only work if someone is actually looking up my name, instead of just typing in “Hill, David,” seeing that it resolves to someone, and assuming that’s me. For that case (the most common), things get just as wayward, and folks who already have me listed somewhere are more inconvenienced..

It’s worked the other way around, of course. For a long time, I used to get e-mail that should have gone to “Hill, David (Cape Cod),” which was actually an alias set up for a client’s address. I got notifications of all sorts of meetings I should have been in, good stuff like that. And since the client was associated with a line of business that I did a lot of work with, it took actual reading to determine if the message was meant for me …

There have been times when there were three DaveHillish names in the global address list. There have been more times when there was only one (me). Now we’re in an annoying period when there are two.

I could change mine, again, or demand the other guy change his, but it wouldn’t solve all the problems, or even most of them, and it would create nice, shiny new ones.

*sigh*

There are times I envy Margie’s unique moniker.