Gmail

Last weekend I had to do the most difficult, nostalgia-inducing, heart-wrenching thing a woman can do when preparing to change her name for marriage.

I tried to get a new Gmail account.

For the purposes of this story, rather than use my real name (you stalkers) I'm going to use my old blogging moniker, Indigo Jones, and Mike's current one, Josef Blind. It took me a long time to make the decision on what name to use. Should I remain Indigo Jones? Could I be Indigo Jones-Blind? Or should I just go with Indigo Blind? After a lot of thinking I decided it would be best to just go with Indigo Blind because it would mean a lot to Josef. After the decision was made I immediately hopped online to reserve my Gmail account.

I always use my name as my email account because it looks more professional that way. My current account is ihjones@gmail.com*. It's better than putting something like sparklestarz999@gmail.com on my resume. Anyway, I didn't realize what a common last name Blind was, or how many people would already have Gmail accounts with that surname. So many user names were already taken!

ihblind was taken.

indigoblind was taken.

indigo.blind was taken.

ih_blind wasn't allowed because they don't allow underscores.

But that didn't matter because ih.blind and i.h.blind were both taken too.

Gmail kept suggesting screenames that were all incredibly lame, such as blindind, inblind, and blindster. Who would take blindster? Well, aside from my brother, who already uses jonester. Really.

I was on the verge of informing Josef that I'd be hyphenating my name, but I figured that just wanting ihjones.blind@gmail.com was a pretty poor reason for choosing your name. I mean, you should consider more important factors than your email account when choosing your name. Like how cool it would sound with "Dr." in front just in case you ever go for that PhD.

I eventually settled on ihblindslp. It's not perfect, but it works.

I wonder if sparklestarz is taken yet...







* Not really. I'm using a fake name, remember? Stalkers.