Read on if you are applying for a job, have an online marriage profile or socially operate primarily from your office cockpit. If you’re using an e-mail handle you created with the coming of electronic mail — since that sort of sensibility evolves with exposure to the medium — or under influence of the hypercreativity hormone, you might be judged; too harshly, no doubt.
So, we hope you are not the devastatinglyhandsome@domainame.com, who just applied for the office vacancy. You are already water cooler talk, and there is
speculation about which ‘fresher’ you are from the lot. We’d really like to know you; really.
We understand if you tried beating the nth person to your favoured handle, Apophis, but the username was unavailable. So you tried Apophis2036, Apophis-2036, Apophis2-0-3-6, apOphis2036, but didn’t manage to land one. With due respect to the exasperation these processes can cause, you could have done better than beef_sister. You didn’t think you scored with that; did you?
We will also try to understand if you form the not-so-secret regiment — with ‘at your service’ as its motto, your identity given away by code suffix ‘4U’. A quick survey of dating sites puts the number as hundreds of thousands. The sad news is: you go largely undetected — thanks to the numbers — by handles like thieroy4U, therevolution4U, fairyboy4U, loko4U and so on. We put you down as earnest, but clueless — the Johny Englishes on the dating realm. And let’s not go down the ‘can’t leave your libido at home’ road, like fearmybooty. It just might spin off responses like: “Why, does it smell? Are you going to sit on me?” And it’s nice to be cute mister nicebutdim, but as you rightly point out, it is a little dim.
And when on matrimonial sites, your handle is going to be your first and last elevator pitch. So unless you want to come across as a brand of super-strong Jaipuri beer (Royal5000) or yours faithfully, on steroids (MK_Powerfully) or the suggestive getmequick — names plucked from shaadi.com — then we suggest you keep it real. Only a few would get a chance to explain, as Jonbon007 got with his punch-line “bond with me for the rest of my life”.
As with most names, however, there comes a story. Take kachrawala@
gmail.com. That’s Anil Bhatia, who heads an advanced locality management team at Marine Drive and has been focused on solid waste management for the past 16 years. “My daughter said that whenever she read about me in the papers, it’s always about kachra (waste). So, since my basic dhanda is kachra, she said that would be the best name to use. I don’t know whether the ID is unusual, but that stands for what I do,” Bhatia says.
The personal e-mail names of Harjit (surname withheld), a Chennai-based sales manager, may sound like misdirected teen angst — scratchmedown and suffocatedlungs — but are a shade darker. “The first one says it’s all too much to take, eliminate me. I came up with the other one at a time when I was totally suffocated by the helplessness of people around me,” he says.
But to the banana_mama(s) or king(s)_of_the_loo of the virtual world, we say, leave a little to the imagination.
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