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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

My name isn’t super known, but it happened to be the same as that of a very big fish in the financial institution I worked for.

Thankfully these people were working mostly through physical meetings and calls, so no sensitive info was leaked, but I did get calendar invites to discuss the future of entire countries as an engineering intern.

I used the name a couple times to set up our internal meetings in the fancier upper floors, so we could have whiteboard discussions over a fancy hardwoods table. No one questioned the name appearing in the entrance display as the current user.

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Not identical, but I once shared most of the first name as well as my last name with a VP of research at the company I worked for, and we were in the same technical field. My (much less impressive) publication record got confused with his frequently and I always wondered if it gave me a career boost.

>> My name isn’t super known, but it happened to be the same as that of a very big fish in the financial institution I worked for.

Same thing happened to me. My name in outlook was the right under a high up VP. Outlook auto correct would bring my name up at the top of the list so people would just hit enter and write their email.

Same thing, I was getting some emails I clearly should not have been viewing, with budgetary spreadsheets and names of people who were being considered for layoffs.

One of them I sent back to the VP and diplomatically explained the mixup. I didn't get any emails for a few months and wondered how they fixed the situation. I guess they gave the VP and underscore in his name instead of the normal firstname.lastname@company.com so now when I typed in my name, his came up first.

Plot twist: you were the real VP all along.

We had a board member who frequently emailed confidential documents to a security guard with the same name as another director.

It was his iPad's fault, apparently.

How did that play out?

It basically defines the organization.

My deadname was not only owned by some other people in my industry, it was also used by someone else born in the same hospital, same ward on the same day, on the same morning as me. That was endlessly irritating.

Glad to see that after five years post abandoning it my contribution to the name is basically gone from the internet now.

>>it was also used by someone else born in the same hospital, same ward on the same day, on the same morning as me. That was endlessly irritating

How so? Other than a funny coincidence, how would that ever come up anywhere in anything unless you both lived in a tiny community where everyone knows each other. I just don't understand how someone born on the same day as you having the same name was "irritating".

An ex-gf of mine’s dad had the same name and birthday as a convict. Caused him plenty of trouble when crossing the border apparently. Hopefully that’s not the case for GP

Used to work as a manager at a pizza place and we had a guy apply to deliver who had the same name as... their son.

Allegedly Jr. had a lengthy record including some drug offenses and something like a DUI / DWI. Naturally Sr. And Jr's records got crossed since they have the same First, Last, and Address, which caused Sr. many headaches including that we required a driving record check that would fail on a DUI / DWI.

Birthdate and place of birth are used as identifiers (I have been asked what hospital/city I was born in before on paperwork).

>I just don't understand how someone born on the same day as you having the same name was "irritating".

Because, lacking a national identity number, the natural way to distinguish to people in a system when the name wouldn’t do is going to be age/birthdate or location.

Try it sometime... My name is somewhat common, but not even close to "John Smith" common... but even at about 1:20,000 or so I've seen a few conflicts just from my name. Another me was born the same day in the state I reside in... I've had a few things on my credit history get tangled up over it.

I've also met two others with the same name, purely coincidentally, not related. I worked on an access/security software team at a major bank (about 350k employees internationally at the time), I found 3 bugs just by being me. Since even SSN/Tax-Id varied, there were several ways to match identity and I had conflicts in a couple of them with other employees. Last Name + last-4 of tax/ssn/national-id (for whatever country the employee was in) was one of them. I don't recall the other two right now, been about 15 years.

Nice to meet you, Jeff Lebowski.

Now stay out of Malibu

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