@RogerBW what did you say to Leder Games about my order??? 
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Mine went into junk. It was from Europe fulfilment.
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Thanks. Nothing in there but lots of notices about how Iāve won bitcoin!!! Oh boy, Iām gonna be rich
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Dad, I want a bitcoin for my birthday.
$2,310!? Son, when I was your age, getting $1,798 was a lot of work! Why, I didnāt earn my first $3,215 until I worked for over two months! And what exactly are you going to do with $985 anyway?
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Man, why donāt I get emails telling me Iāve won bitcoin? Instead itās just daily ransom demands telling me to pay bitcoin because they hacked my email, thereby gaining access to my computer and video camera, which they apparently used to record videos of me jerking off to dodgy porn, which they intend to release to all my contacts unless I pay up.
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I get all of the above plus I seem to be winning a āDysonVacuumā every single day!
Iām sure last year Iād get one or two emails a week into the Spam folder. This year Iām getting tens a day and Iām wondering whatās changed.
Hackers bored at home??
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My dad keeps getting those emails but it looks like its been sent from his own email address. He was really worried that someone had taken control of his email. I had to break it down for him thus:
- If you received a typed letter in the post with your name at the bottom, would you think someone had taken control of your body?
- You donāt know how to delete your internet history - I can see itās basically rugby scores, DIY tips, and ancestry.com all the way back to 2010.
- Your laptop doesnāt have a webcam.
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My dad once called paypal customer support to tell them someone had sent him a fishing email. I am proud of him for not clicking on it, though. (In general my dad does really well with modern technology considering heās 76)
I also get a bunch of funny emails. Interestingly, I cannot read most of them because I donāt speak Japanese. A lot of those emails are not spam. Many Japanese people seem to think my gmail address is their email address. Yashimaā¦ is apparently a town in Japan? And a common name?
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I find people do that with my gmail too. Tonnes of people in India register my email address for random stuff. Sometimes they try and claim it too because it was from the olden days of gmail (where you needed a referral).
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Email works by having local-parts and domains. Gmail among its many sins effectively removes the domain part.
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I donāt use gmail exclusively, just for stuff that I donāt really care about or when I donāt have the time to put in a spam safe dedicated mail address or when I have to write it on a form somewhere that I am afraid people wont be able to read my handwriting
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Sure, Iām not saying ādonāt use gmailā (well, I often say it, but itās not what Iām arguing here) - the problem is that when everyone is someone@gmail thereās more contention than there would be if people were more generally used to the idea of being someone@somewhere.
Much as .com became The TLD to have and many people really donāt get the idea that e.g. .co.uk is a separate namespace - a name is a name, apparently. (You tell them āPiccadilly in London is not the same street as Piccadilly in Manchesterā and they still donāt get it.)
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Yeh, a lot of people donāt actually donāt know their email. They forget that they had to register firstnamelastname76[at]gmail and keep telling people itās firstnamelastname[at]gmail, so if thatās your email, youāre gonna get a lot of stuff not meant for you.
Managing websites, we get a lot of similar problems. Either someone emailing support because ātheir username is takenā and you find out they were trying to use ājohnsmithā as a username, or someone got an unwanted forgotten password email because a user assumed ājohnsmithā was their username.
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At my work I have a very common name - 4 people have my name. I was the first, so I got the āname.surname@ā, and everyone after me got āname.surname#@ā.
I got a lot of the othersā emails, but especially from one of the others who works in histopathology, as I work in histocompatibility. And that person was a bigwig so I got quite a few highly confidential emails, and some emails inviting me to teach medical students autopsies!
I asked to change my email address to āname.initial.surname@ā to avoid confusion. It worked well.
ā¦until Mr Histopathology Bigwig decided to take my old email address (that I had vacated to make it easier for him!!!). So I had the account name and he had the email address. ALL the IT systems assume everyoneās email address and account is the same. Any time IT did anything to their servers my account did crazy things. I would gain and lose server drives, licenses to software would disappear, certain functions of software wouldnāt work.
After a good 12 months of IT coming up with botch fixes which only helped until the next time, I finally got someone who would sort it out. took a lot of work for IT to untie everything. 
I think they basically wiped everything and created me a new account to match the email? There are still a few things in my profile that seem to do weird things that doesnāt happen in my colleagues.
I hate my name 
I have a few other weird stories about meeting people with my name. It sucks
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This is where having two surnames (we do get both first surnames from our parents in Spain) does help a lot.
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Is there a pattern for which parent gives you your āfirstā surname, or is it whatever sounds best?
I do wish I had a crazy forename or a double barrel surname, but my parentsā surnames donāt work together at all.
In Spanish, you get your father first surname as your first, and your motherās first as second surname. Women never change their surname when they marry (save some money there on changing passports, I guess)
I know in Portugal, probably through so many years of alliance with Britain, it is the other way round (as normally in the anglosphere you get your fatherās surname as your ālast nameā) and they put their fatherās surname last, but they pass their fatherās surname to their children.
It is all complicated. I know I tend to sign just my first name, initial the second name and put my paternal surname only as in the anglosphere everybody is used to only one surname (and it saves time, I wonāt deny it). But for official paperwork (like sales, or banking) I put down both with a hyphen, as a double barreled, to avoid confusion.
It is a funny one, but after a while you get used to it.
Although, for double barrel in English there is no rule about which one goes first, is it?
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Yeah, in the UK itās all for aesthetics, so whichever way round sounds better. Traditionally, double barreled names are seen as a very posh thing to do - I guess from the days when the family names of the landed gentry were important. Maybe there were more rules around names back then, Iām not sure.
These days itās seen as more of a lifestyle choice, especially with a movement away from patriarchal conventions. Double barreled names can still used as short hand for well-to-do upper middle class in literature and TV though - the name + the accent gives an instant idea of a type of character. I donāt know many Brits with double barreled names.
I imagine itās the same in most Germanic/Anglo countries. Weāre obsessed with pedigree 
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