Have you ever had experience(s) dealing with someone who had the same name as you?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

There’s a guy I follow on Bluesky who I share a name with - he’s a professor of politics so quite interesting, but it’s weird when you scroll through your feed and see your name alongside an opinion on e.g. The Bear that you agree with but can’t remember having actually typed out.

But the really weird one was when I went to university. The halls I was staying in had been in touch to let me know I was in a shared room, staying with this guy (NotMyName) and (would they do this now?) sharing his number so we could get in touch ahead of showing up. So I excitedly made all these plans about who would bring what etc. and then turned up to find I was in a single room. And also that there was another Stanislaus, who had had no idea till he turned up that he was sharing with this poor other guy. What made it weird though was: OtherStanislaus was roughly my height and build, same colouring, not just at my uni but at my halls of residence… we talked a few times but I think we both felt this was too uncomfortably close to the beginning of a stalker movie and kept out of each other’s way except for handing over misdirected mail.

A fucken’ doppelganger, just uncanny.

42

I have a relatively common last name but a quite rare given name.

In recent years I found that there is also a “Joe Schmoe” in Colorado, when I started receiving emails from his accountant. The secretary sent the email to joe.schmoe@gmail.com (me), while I assume his must be “joe.j.schmoe@gmail.com” or some variant.

So once or twice a year I receive personal financial documents emailed to me but intended for my Colorado doppelganger and I reply immediately with “This is Jersey Joe…you want to email this to Colorado Joe.”

The lady is kind about it, and apologizes…then another email shows up several months later.

Oh yes…back when Googling one’s self was the latest thing, I did so and found my name was an exact match for that of a gay porn star. When I told my wife, she told me she had already Googled our names and had been suitably shocked at my alternate past.

Dude looks better than me.

43

I work at a family-run produce market. My dad, my grandfather and I all have the same name (first and last, different middle names). There was plenty of confusion, and still is between my dad and I, when people don’t know which one of us they’re looking for. When you call and ask for “Joe”, you have to be more specific than that, which, through no fault of their own, they don’t know how to be more specific than that and usually aren’t expecting the reply to “I’m looking for Joe P” to be “Which one?”.
At one point we had three people named Joe and three people named Tony (all but one of those six people had the same last name as well).

Other than that, my last name isn’t very common so I’ve only run into it once in the wild. In college, a friend of mine was telling me a story that involved her friend “Jake P”*. I looked at her and said ‘wait, what…who?’ and she said “oh yea, that’s your last name” to which I replied “yeah, and it’s my brother’s first name”. I knew there was a branch of my family that lived in same city as her, but I don’t know any of them and had no reason to know any them were the same age as her, much less that they would’ve gone to the same school. But it was still jarring to hear.
*Not his real name

There was some random person that, for years was using our phone number on all kinds of loans and credit cards and anything else that would involve collections needing to track him down at some point. That got old. Especially since, and I don’t blame them, the collections people just assume you’re full of shit when you tell them that the person they’re looking for isn’t associated with this number in any way whatsoever. They gave you a bullshit number that happens to be mine.

44

At least monthly I try to look up someone from my past etc., and Google finds nothing about them. Mostly people who are dead, but not only.

45

These stories are both fascinating and scary!

My last name is not that common, yet there are a few dozen people in my state alone with my first and last name, several within driving distance. TruePeopleSearch dot com is a good source.

A simple Google search turns up a fellow halfway across the globe who’s apparently quite famous for the handcrafted manufacture of musical instruments.

And I was surprised to find a fellow with my name in my hometown who died at a young age some years ago. No wonder I stopped getting invitations to the high school reunions!

46

Does it count if I’m the third? Other than my father and grandfather, however, I don’t know anyone with my name.

47

Well, you have experience dealing with someone who had… as in the OP title.

48

It’s a fair indicator, however. I have never in my 78 years met someone with either my birth last name or my stepfather’s last name (which I got stuck with). They’re out there, but both names are just uncommon.

49

Inthe 90"s I was in out patient sugery. They wanted to know if I’d had a rather specific bloodwork at sign in. I was there for a tubal. She was going to be there for something more serious.
We shated first and last name. She lived at (addres) Street I lived at (address) Road.

My husband tried to fill a script for Norco at a Rite- Aid. They wouldn’t fill it because he’d already filled it at a Rite-Aid in Six lakes. A town He’d never been to. It turned out husband shared the same first and last name and birthday. Month Day and Year. When the idiot pharmacist in our Rite-Aid (not the one he went to originally) saw the first last name and birtday info, hechanged one of their social security numers to match the other’s number in Rite-Aid’s system.

I had quite the conversation with the pharmacy tech and ultimately with the pharmacist in Six Lakes. Tech was rude insisted she knew me, and husband and I were trying to get illicet drugs. We changed pharmacies after that debacle.

Ugh, many typos don’t have time to fix.

50

My family name is unique to us, as far as any of us can tell. My great grandfather and his siblings had a much longer and complex name when they came over from the old country. The current spelling frist shows up in the 1910 census records and we’ve never found another family that isn’t directly related to that group.

I did find a restaurant in Malaysia with our family name and I’ve wanted to visit there just to find out where they got it.

51

I’m pretty pretty sure that my particular combination of Spanish name and somewhat rare Jewish surname is unique in the world (There may be another Frodo Bagginstein somewhere but I very much doubt it).
My first name, though is pretty common, to the point that my first roleplaying group had 3 persons with it, and that’s why everybody took to calling me by my BBS nick (said BBS being how I got in contact with the rest of the group).
When I signed in to the BBS both Aragorn and Gandalf were taken so…

52

I have a very common first name and a last name that people think is uncommon, but it’s actually fairly common. Back when I had a landline with an answering machine, I came home to a message from an Australian guy who said “[Firstname Lastname], ya methafeckah, 'ow the ''ell ah ya?”

He went on to say he was in town for a few days and was hoping to hear from me. He mentioned the hotel he was staying at but didn’t leave any other contact info, including his name. He called back a couple days later, sounding a little irritated, saying he was going to leave soon, still hoped to hear from me, and gave his room number, so I called him out of curiosity. Turns out he used to work with a guy with my name, and said I sounded exactly like him. I had to convince him I wasn’t who he thought I was.

53

No shit. All of us know that. There are a huge amount of very rare surnames. If you Google my last name or enter it into Facebook you get like 25 people at most. Combine that will a less common variant spelling of a not very common first name that doesn’t match the ethnicity of the last name and the last name until 1910 or so was only spelled in Cyrillic and there are two ways to transliterate it and it’s a very safe bet that one’s name is unique.

54

My last name is VERY common. My first name is among the common names for my birth year.

  1. When I was in college, I was involved in Theatre. There was another person with my exact name also involved in Theatre. The tech director got great amusement from putting us on the lighting crew together, so that the name would appear twice in the program. The other “me” shared that he knew a third person with the same name, AND that he had dated a girl who had also dated the third person too! At one point, #2 invited me to a party where I was introduced to the girl. When #2 told her my name, her eyes LIT UP! I chose not to be added to her collection.
  2. At one point, I was working as a temporary office worker. The assignment for the week was taking phone orders from restaurants for supplies. Coincidentally, the boss had the same name as me. As I was new to the job, I didn’t always get the order details correct (orders coming in from immigrant owned establishments, strong accents, specific terms unfamiliar to me hastily written, etc.) After a few days, I get calls from some of the same customers complaining that I got the order wrong. They wanted to know my name so they could complain, which I shared, of course!
55

Not me. My last name, if spelled correctly, is very uncommon.

It is very similar though, within a couple of letters, to a much more common name.
I DO have to correct people about the exact spelling very frequently.

56

My grandfather came off the boat from Greece in 1920 and our last name was changed.

My wife is into genealogy and she was having a lot of difficulty finding anything on my side of the family. She had our current last name and the original Greek spelling, but the only thing she had found was the ship’s manifest from when my Grandfather had come to America (the ship was Greek and the crew was Greek, so it makes sense that they had the original Greek spelling of our name correct). Mrs. Geek asked me for all of the ways our last name could be misspelled (I’ve had a lot of experience with folks spelling my name wrong over the years) and she was ale to find two other forms. On the 1920 census, our last name was misspelled, and all of the names on that page of the census were written in the same handwriting. So we’re fairly certain that the census-taker just wrote down everyone’s names and probably just guessed at the spelling (he probably didn’t speak Greek).

Mrs. Geek also found my grandfather’s immigration form, and you can easily tell how poor his English skills were. He literally misspelled every single line on the form, including his own name. He didn’t know how to write “John” using English letters, and wrote “GOHN”.

If you translate our name directly from the Greek version, you end up with a cluster of letters at the front of it which are difficult for Americans to pronounce. What we ended up with was a very simplified version of our name that is easy for Americans to pronounce.

It’s also unique. I am related to every person in the U.S. with that last name, and none of them have the same first name that I have.

I always hated having a “weird” last name. I would have preferred something more ordinary, even if it did mean that I would end up with the same name as a lot of other guys.

My first name though is very common, so common that there were four boys with the same name in the neighborhood where I grew up. And this was a fairly small neighborhood. All of the other boys in the neighborhood also had common names, but they were unique within that neighborhood. My name was the only one that was duplicated.

Usually you could tell from context which one of us someone was talking about, but it did get confusing at times.

About 10 or 15 years ago or so, my mother started getting calls from a collection agency looking for my father. The important thing to note here is that my father died in a car crash in 1971. After several attempts at trying to tell them that they were trying to collect money from a dead man who could not have possibly created the debt, my mother gave up and just gave them the phone number to the cemetery where he was buried and told them they could find him at that number.

They stopped calling. :slight_smile:

57

I have a fairly common for my age range first name, a very unusual last name - there are some alternative spelling that are equally uncommon. For years and years I was the only person I knew with my combination

A few years ago I was at a professional conference and someone with the same first name and one of the less common last name variations posted to a list serve - think Jane Smith/Jane Smyth as the difference. I spent the rest of the conference with people I know asking me if I’d seen the post from my “evil twin”. But still not the exact name.

Then a few years ago, another one with my exact first/last name popped up. Turns out, she had married my father’s first cousin and change her surname, so now she was my same exact name.

Even better, we both work in academia. And despite our names being rare, at both institutions we have 1 appended onto our email indicating we’re not the first person with that first initial, lastname combo. We’re also at institutions where it would be easy to typo the full email address because they’re literally 1 letter different:

For example , on might be jsmyth1@abc.edu and the other jsmyth1@adc.edu

I’ve not gotten email for her yet, but I did have someone reach out on linked in thinking I was her.

58

Let’s say my name for this purpose is ‘Merry Carey’. There is, or was, a very well-known do-gooder in this city by the name of ‘Mary Carey’. I used to get calls all the time and have to explain that unfortunately I was just a nobody who couldn’t help them and I never even met Mary Carey. … For that matter, I never once met another ‘Merry’ in my life, either.

59

Not many Meriadocs anymore…

(In LOTR Merry is the nickname of hobbits called Meriadoc)

60

I had just finished college, specializing in animation and special effects. I got an email from somebody congratulating me on graduating and asking if I had finished editing that video for their wedding (or something).

I had done videography on the side, but I did not know this person. It felt like the Twilight Zone.

Turns out, someone who shares my name (common first, rare last) had also graduated college that year. Film school. In Santa Barbara, while I was in Silicon Valley. I had my name with Yahoo, and he had it with Hotmail. I forwarded him the email and we shared a virtual laugh.

A couple months later, I ran into him at a Whole Foods. He got into the masters film program at Stanford, near where I worked. I don’t normally shop at Whole Foods. I’m not sure I had stepped foot in that location more than one other time. Really random coincidence.