When I worked for my university's Student Computing department, usernames were all "up to 7 characters from surname + the first letter of their given name." So there were plenty of stories about bad usernames that the admins would have to fix.

The best one for me, personally, was when I helped a student out whose surname was Takashi and his first name started with a T.

It didn't help that no one at Oregon State considered the 'www' when they chose the school's first domain name. So that turned into takashit@www.orst.edu

Edit to add: This was in the mid-90s. That was that guy's first and (at the time) only email address.

Wow, the kid named finger

Corrected to .....

fingermeg@cwu.edu

Optional to ...

fingermegan@cwu.edu

When I handled these, I always checked for poor taste collisions. If found, granted an immediate exception.

She would be Megan.finger@.

Fuck the old systems with hard character limits.

Megan Bennett Finger
Central Washington University

Ms. Finger,

Per your request, we have converted your email address to our alternate format: [Surname][Middle Initial]Last (to denote the spelled-out name)[First 2 letters of forename]. Your new email address is now fingerblastme@cwu.edu and your case is now closed.

Thank you,
CWU Support

Worked at a company where emails were first initial then last name. So there was a guy named Shawn Lutz so his email was SLutz@email.com

It seemed I was the only one really aware of that since he almost never sent emails

There was an Alan Buser at my last company…yep, abuser@company.com. Not only did he have to live with that as his email, but he would occasionally receive reports that definitely should have gone to HR. Eventually they let us alias it to alan@company, but as far as I know when I left he was still getting anything sent to abuser@company too. He was such a nice guy too!

As Nikita Grigorev, I was given an allcaps username made out of first two letters of my name and two letters of surname. I complained, but I was told that the process is a process. They changed for the ANAL guy before, but not for me. So I was called basically a slur for two years

I read that as @uwu

OK, if you insist, I will.

$ finger me
Login: me                               Name: mikhail esteban
Directory: /sdf/udd/m/me                Shell: /bin/ksh
Never logged in.
New mail received Sat Feb 22 13:32 2025 (UTC)
     Unread since Tue Feb  4 07:35 2025 (UTC)
No Plan.

My wife's name sounds like Annette Alonso (not her real name - this one is made up) , and her new employer had standardised emails the first two letters from the first name and the first two letters from last name. You bet she was furious with anal@company.com, given that she was going to be working with clients. She ultimately got it changed to anna@company.com

Gosh, I would have never figured this out without the giant useless red line!

It even tells people where they can do it!

Thank you for the arrow I would've never guess myself

I know how to fix this, just had the 3rd letter of her first name.