My name is very similar to another person’s. Say, Susan Lastname and Susin Lostnoun. We lived in the same state, were in the same profession, had similar jobs and specialties, and were volunteers in the same professional organizations. We’d get mail and email intended for the other, and at conferences, we occasionally switched nametags.
As far as I know, I’m related to everyone in the US with my last name, and I’m the only one with this first name so I think I’m clear.
When I used to live in Indianapolis, I would occasionally get phone calls for someone who apparently had the same name as me. My name was listed first in the phone book (remember phone books?), so his friends would call me. Once I got a call from one of his neighbors, whose car had broken down and needed a lift. I couldn’t help her, apart from telling her to look down the phone book a couple more lines.
For quite awhile after he had passed away, we would get calls for my father about an unpaid tuition bill to “Johnson Bible College,” an institution he never attended.
Not me personally, but my ex sure did. Her maiden name was identical to a certain… let’s just say notorious figure closely associated with a presidential scandal. If you were alive in the ’90s and owned a TV, you can probably guess.
We’d only been married a few weeks when I sat down for a quiet breakfast with The Today Show. One spoonful in, Katie Couric breaks the story—and bam—a giant photo of my wife flashes on screen. I spilled my Cocoa Puffs and thought, “What has my new bride been up to?”
She was a Fortune 100 C-suite exec, and Reuters had picked up her headshot by mistake. The photo ran everywhere—two of the three major TV networks, Time, Newsweek, the whole circus. Since she worked in banking—a zero-tolerance industry—she sued the bunch for damages. They settled. Handsomely.
He looked like this, I bet. 
My last name isn’t particularly common, and especially uncommon where I currently live, but some years ago, I got a facebook message from another local ( teenager) that said, “Hey, we have the same name!” And we did. Near as I could tell, we weren’t related, or at least not up to four generations back.
Sarah Connor?
My last name is very common. My first name is unusual enough that I’ve never met anyone else with it. Nonetheless, once, when i was visiting a friend i hadn’t seen in a while, he greeted me with, “hi, did you know you died recently?” I expressed surprise. He said that as we hadn’t seen each other for a few years, he thought he should Google me. And he’d found an obituary of someone with my exact name, who had just died.
She was an elderly Orthodox Jew when she died 25 years ago. And as best as i can tell, her obituary in her temple’s monthly newsletter was 100% of her lifetime Internet presence.
If you Google my full name today, you will mostly, maybe entirely, find me. Thirty years ago, if you googled just my first name you mostly found me, but more people are on the Internet than were back then. You used to find weird interesting stuff, like an article someone wrote that incorrectly said i was married to a guy with the same last name who was at an event i went to. Or a letter i wrote complaining about moldy blueberries that accidentally became public. Now you just find boring stuff like my LinkedIn profile and a bunch of professional stuff and companies that sell info that used to be in the phone book.
Despite not having name confusion, I’ve had people be certain my phone number belonged to someone else. It’s hard to convince a bill collector that no, you really aren’t the person who owes money on a car loan. And some guy who ditched a woman gave the woman my phone number, back in the day of land lines. She was really pissed at “me” but eventually realized that no, i wasn’t the guy, and didn’t even share a residence with him.
My family name is pretty uncommon, but there is an extended family (relationship to me is possible but there’s no positive proof) in SoCal and Utah by the same name. None of them so far has my first name, for which I’m grateful, but they are fairly prolific so it may only be a matter of time.
I have a “classic” first name that has several potential spellings, and an uncommon last name, so I’ve never had this experience. I do know that I’m not the only person with this name; last time I Googled it, there was a college student in Utah and a British pediatrician, among others, who were my namesakes.
Back in the days before you had to give half your information to get prescriptions, another pharmacist told me that a city about an hour’s drive away, where she occasionally worked, had a lot of people who had the same name and were similar ages, but weren’t related and didn’t know each other. This was really driven home when a woman came by to pick up her husband’s prescriptions, and when she saw the address on the bag, handed it back and said, “This isn’t my husband; it’s the OTHER guy with his name.” The other guy didn’t pay child support, he didn’t pay any of his other bills either, and more than once, some irate dad would beat on their door and tell him, “You stay the hell away from my daughter!” and he would tell them, “That’s not me; it’s the other guy” and give him directions.
Around that same time, I worked with a woman who found out she had a local namesake when that other woman moved away, and left a mountain of unpaid bills. The one she was contacted the most about was that she hadn’t turned in her cable box. Even if it wasn’t actually her, you never know, she might have been a cousin, a sister-in-law, etc.
Incredibly irritating. Collection agencies are people who just don’t take “no, you’ve got the wrong person”. Don’t ask me how I know.
And yes on another occasion, the government mixed me up with another person. If they would just show me my own damn file, I would have known, but no, “freedom of information laws say that we can’t show you the file”.
That was before the “privacy law” excuse was invented.
On a lighter note, I was amazed to find that the Texas mail order fruit-cake company had on their books, in a middle city on the other side of the world, not two, but 5 people with the same name as my dad.
No. Not a common name round these parts. But I did happen upon a picture of a headstone of an infant that died with my name. That was kinda weird.
Oh hell yeah, sort of. I haven’t dealt directly with other CairoCarols, but I have dealt with the fallout from their behavior on numerous occasions. My name IRL is shared by quite a few people.
As Monk would say, “it’s a blessing and a curse.” It’s annoying to be confused with others when people think you are someone you are not. On the other hand, I will never, ever have a successful stalker, because if you want to find me on line, you need a lot more information than my name to find me.
Sometimes, it has been weird but at least it gave me stories to tell. I’ve had two bizarre phone calls from people who were desperate to make “me” admit my identity:
First one, one afternoon while I was about 22, in grad school:
CALLER: is this CairoCarol?
ME: Yes … who is this?
CALLER: Ruby. Ruby Cairo. Your aunt.
ME: I’m sorry, is it possible you are confusing me with someone else? I don’t know a Ruby and I don’t have an aunt by that name.
CALLER: expletive! expletive! I always thought you were a shithead, CairoCarol! Now you won’t even acknowledge your own aunt! It’s RUBY, damn you! Don’t pretend you don’t know me!
ME: Hanging up now, sorry.
Second call, about two years later, at around 2am:
CALLER: is this CairoCarol?
ME: Yes … who is this?
CALLER: It’s Michael! I need you!
ME: Which Michael? I know several.
CALLER: (whining): Cairo, don’t do this to me. You know who I am and it is just cruelty to pretend you don’t!
ME: Umm, not really. Michael who? I don’t think I know a Michael who would call me in the middle of the night like this, but tell me who you are and I’ll help you if I can.
CALLER: (sobbing) I can’t believe how mean you are! You KNOW who I am! Why won’t you admit it and talk to me?
ME: Hanging up now, sorry.
I am the only person ever with my first and last name. There was a guy who was 50 years older than I am who is long dead with the same last name, same first name but a different spelling variant and different middle initial. Very rare last name.
My name isn’t at all common and I come from a small language, but there are still many people with the same first and last names. I’m pretty surprised with the number of “I’m the only one” replies above.
BTW, Googling your name does not tell if you are the only one..
I’ve gotten bizarre (to me) phone calls and questions of the “are you the same Toxylon that was interviewed in X?” type.
If anybody was named my horrible name they’d have changed it, as soon as they could have.
It’s really bad…×3.
When I was a kid, we knew we were then only ones with our last name in Maryland, and even today, if you google that last name, you mostly get the same two men - one a lawyer, one a (late) psychiatrist. So I never ran into anyone with the same last name till I was in college - there was a professor whose son found me in the student roster, and they invited me to dinner to meet them. No, we weren’t related and they pronounced it wrong, anyway! 
When I married, I acquired a very common surname, and paired with my first name, I shared it with a fantasy novelist, tho she eventually dropped it as a pseudonym and wrote under her real name. But when I use First Name Maiden Name Married Name, I’m pretty sure I’m one of a kind. I do come up in Google with the middle initial rather then full maiden name, but that’s it. I’m special!
There is someone with the same name in La Crosse (just across the river from me). I occasionally get calls for him.
Brian
Some years ago, I received an email confirmation of an on-line purchase that I hadn’t, in fact, made. It eventually turned out that someone with the same name as me had an email account with the same provider, and I’d already bagged his preferred short form of the name, so he’d had to use his full first name. The problem was that he obviously kept forgetting, and giving people my email address instead of his own.
I found out quite a bit about him over the next few months: the school he taught at, his hobbies (football and vintage railways), even his clothing sizes. I don’t know if he ever figured it out – I certainly never told him.
A few years later, I was living in a small village (a suburb of a medium-sized town), and when I went to the pharmacy to collect my prescription, I was twice given the wrong one. Same name, but a different address. Each time, the address was different. So it seemed there were two other guys registered with this one small pharmacy with the same name as me.
No, it doesn’t. The other Puzzlegal, who obit my friend read? You can’t find her by googling anymore. Haven’t been able to for years.