For example, there’s a semi-famous young woman whose work email was her first initial and last name. Her name is Samantha Hart.-you can see the problem. I have a business I use who seem to have a similar issue and I’d like to gently let them know about it. Or maybe just leave them be?
If it’s that obvious I’m sure they’ve heard it many times before from kids growing up.
She has been S. Hart her whole life. She knows.
One does wonder what her parents were thinking, though. I went to school with a guy whose name was Gregory Andrew Young, who used to lie about what his middle name was so he wouldn’t get teased in middle school.
I mean, they will tease you if your initials spell something innocuous, like Hans Ole Weldon, and he was a popular kid, but any time the word “how” came up around him, people thought it was hilarious to over-emphasize it. All because he had a jersey once with HOW on the back.
Albeit, I think Hans’ parents were second-language English speakers.
I wonder if half of the team of Gilbert & Sullivan had a rough childhood-- and really, what the HELL were the parents of Arthur Seymour Sullivan thinking?
The business in question specifically has a work email I’m thinking about, not personal.
It’s not Pen Island, is it?
They might know.
If it’s a work thing, they may not have recourse to go outside the standard e-mail format.
I knew two other people that had to deal with this, a Mark Asher and a Larry Overman. It more common than you think. Even if it’s not dirty or nasty, it can be embarrassing or just weird. An ex of mine named Charles Harms thought his work e-mail that made him sound like a teenaged girl, he hated it.
If a business has publicized an email address, they’re not going to change it. Too many signs, websites, marketing materials, business cards, etc. have the old one. Not to mention gosh knows how many contacts in their customers’ email programs.
Now they might create a new one then begin using and advertising it alongside the old one. And forward the old email traffic to the new address. But it’ll be a decade or more before they can switch off the old one.
My advice: Enjoy your little in-joke and don’t bother them with this silly concern.
That brings back memories of an elaborate house near ours back in Jakarta. Among some rich Indonesians with no understanding of what constitutes good taste in Western style, you can come across some wealth-flaunting decor that is hilariously garish.
The house in question had a lot of stained glass in its windows, including a huge “ASS” in gothic script. It probably stood for something like Ahmad Sudowo Sukarno, or some similar combination of ordinary Indonesian names, but it cracked us up every time we walked by.
ETA: to answer the OP, I agree with the prevailing sentiment to leave it alone.
Chances are, they already know. Bringing it to their attention won’t help things and may poison your business relationship with them.
Having worked with people whose work-assigned names were slum, screw, and wtf, leave it alone.
Just a s data point: I’ve never heard of a “shart” before. I had to look it up just now. Native English speaker, raised in NE US in the 1970s and 80s, have lived in several Western and Midwest US locales.
I won’t reveal it here but when my parents signed up for AOL, they chose a very embarrassing email name. As far as I know, they never figured it out and my mother is still using it.
My employer generates usernames as first two of first name, first two of last name, four digits. So John Smith would be josm5862. Fortunately surnames starting with “ck” or “it” are very rare, but really am not sure what they would do if Sheila Itugbu needed a username. Polly Oppenheimer hopefully is enrolled as Pauline. I have encountered caca1234 before.
That generated username is a valid email address, but fortunately aliases are allowed, so no reason to use fool9943@example.com when you can be Foster.Olson@example.com.
I had an international student once, who when she came to the country, chose a university email based on her name.
It was “wank@domain”
Once she found out what it meant, she did not want to use her official email anymore (we required it). I helped her change it, without the usual fee associated with changing her official university email. The tech people were very understanding.
Yeah: what do you say? “Hey, I’d like to point out, in case you’ve missed it in your 34 years on this planet, and everyone you went to middle school with missed it, that your last name and first initial spell ‘SHART.’ It’s what people call a fart with a skidmark. In case you didn’t already know. Wanted to save you the embarrassment of being ‘fartwithaskidmark @ work . com.’”
Why be gentle? Why not just tell them?
If you want anonymity, open a throwaway email box at Yahoo or hotmail or whatever. Send them a message saying " I have purchased $X from you, and want to do much more business with you, but I cannot-- because your name is so rude that I cannot keep it printed in my files" (or make up some other excuse).
Not all email providers do this, but notably GMail ignores a period in your name, so someone with shart@gmail. com can tell people it’s s.hart@gmail. com and it will get to the same place.
Of course one famous person with this problem is Childish Gambino aka Donald Glover who could’ve gotten a donglover email at some point.
I knew a guy named Dean Thomas who worked for a company whose email addresses were “first 3 letters of first name followed by first 5 letters of last name”. So his email was deathoma. I thought that was pretty awesome.
The question immediately makes me think of this.
Would it be uncouth of me to share the email address in question? I’m assuming yes.