Naming convention outs you as an OG

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Kardinal@reddit

Yup. All our IDs are X digits and have nothing to do with our name due to ancient and no longer relevant Mainframe ID limitations.

People like me (15 years) have IDs starting with one letter. Newer people it starts with a different one. Those who preceded me go back to an even older convention that started with yet another one!

And our security people think that somehow not using email address to login is somehow more secure. Which I disagree with. (Yes I know why. I disagree with it. From an educated perspective.)

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jjohnson1979@reddit

due to ancient and no longer relevant Mainframe ID limitations.

So, unrelated to the subject, but I used to work in such a place. The username convention was first initial plus lastname, but it had to have 8 characters. Not 8 character maximum, but exactly 8 character. One guy was named Justin Wong... So they had to make his username "justwong"... And that's...

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Canadian_Loyalist@reddit

Sounds like IBM to me but I'm sure there were lots of places like that.

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virtualdxs@reddit

I was going to say, I remember RETAIN being like that, at least for the password

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Ferretau@reddit

Universe a db from IBM required the use of all lowercase otherwise it wouldn't integrate work with AD accounts

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Kardinal@reddit

I feel like there's hundreds of unfortunate stories like this out there.

Places that used firstinitial.lastname for people who were named...before that was a thing. And reverse, where it's lastnamefirstinitial.

Artificial length limitations.

Etc.

IT is funny if you stop to appreciate it.

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iPhritzy@reddit

I knew a teacher once with a last name Buse (pronounced like Gary Busey’s last name) and first name started with A. So parents would get emails from abuse@school.edu.

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Thecp015@reddit

Our “first name last initial” has led to some fun ones.

Dong. Sharona. Anal.

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PsychoGoatSlapper@reddit

My lesbian sister legitimately had to sign in with f a g (all one word)

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Specialist_Cow6468@reddit

I fondly remember a shart

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mountaindrewtech@reddit

Out of all of our users, we have one user where their username was capped to 8 characters and took off one friggin letter from their last name.

Not worth anyones time to remediate at this point.

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anders_andersen@reddit

Justin wo?

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jayhat@reddit

Long ago, when I first started at help desk job, I asked the caller for their user ID as we were supposed to do to start a ticket. He gave me an all numeric value and I was like “ugh the user ID has to have a letter in it”. He goes “you haven’t been here long have you?”. Unbeknownst to me the people who had been there for ages had all numeric user IDs.

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ArborlyWhale@reddit

You would be right. Non-name based logins are good for scalability and automation reasons, but security ain’t it.

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dezirdtuzurnaim@reddit

This sounds like old school IBM mainframe/as400

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Kardinal@reddit

You can see my flair. I'm an old timer but my whole career has been MS so I know little to nothing about it.

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binarypower@reddit

im one of 7 left in a company if 2,000+ with an certain letter in my emploee id (same employee number since 2002)

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meatwad75892@reddit

We probably have a ton of top-level folders in users' mailboxes called "Cabinet" because of Groupwise.

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ManyHatsAdm@reddit

Oh God, the day users discovered notification sounds. You could always tell when a group email went round because there'd be a minute or so of beep-beep coming from every desktop. Did you know though that you could replace that beep with your own composition? Of any length?

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post4u@reddit

Even fewer will remember the time it took for mail to be delivered due to the sending schedules of the post office servers. That's right, kids. Email wasn't always instant. Someone would send something to their post office. It would sit in a queue until picked up by your post office. Miss that pickup that happens ever 30 minutes? Too bad. Now you have to wait another 30 to get that email.

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jstar77@reddit (OP)

Groupwise, now that's a blast from the past.

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brianinca@reddit

Don't forget, it started as WordPerfect Office, and was an amazing tool even in DOS.

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reverendjb@reddit

And I still use it.

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Bogus1989@reddit

lol our org was like this....until recently they finally killed off any remnants still left.

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PoorUsernameChooser@reddit

Killing people to clean up user name database is pretty harsh.

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miteycasey@reddit

My company it’s on its 4th. Can tell how long someone has worked there by their username. 😜

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MonoChz@reddit

Then if you standardize SharePoint is like “who? I have no idea who that is.”

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unkiltedclansman@reddit

You can always tell the old guys who weren’t in IT but are good shits and have been tight with IT throughout the years.

When the company has grown to a multinational org with 80k employees and the random employee, not even in management, still has an alias “mike@company.com”

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GremlinNZ@reddit

Came across that with a software provider. Staff would open scripts and see the author as firstname@ and go ah, the OG yoda wrote this one...

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tobascodagama@reddit

Hah! Yeah, we had a couple of those at my old gig. Always fun to encounter one.

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mediweevil@reddit

my previous org used a centralised government service employee number shortened and headed with a character when the shortened numerical sequence ran out.

my modified ID was c950xxx. I worked with two b411xxx staff who had 34 and 37 years in respectively.

by the time I left they were up to d-numbers, I believe they're on f-numbers.

it's still interesting to go into a company store and quote my old c-number, none of the current children can quite believe it.

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ImportantMud9749@reddit

Our accounts used to be part of your name, then part of your work ID #.

Then they swapped it to part of your last name and essentially a four digit counter that increases if someone else shares that part of your name and already has that username.

So, anyone who has been here a while has a random number and everyone new has either all zeros or zeros and a 1, a few 2s. Don't think I've see any 3s yet.

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freedomlinux@reddit

zeros and a 1, a few 2s. Don't think I've see any 3s yet.

Went to a university ~15 years ago that used a similar system: 5 characters of last name, first initial, incrementing number only if non-unique.

Most people had no number, or perhaps a 2 or 3. Seeing a 4 was pretty unusual ... but then there was a distinct jump due to extremely common names. The record I can remember back then was 23 - ex: Bobby Li becomes lib23 & I can only imagine how high the numbers are now.

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SVD_NL@reddit

Our university used initials.lastname@university.nl. In around here there's quite a few last names that are extremely common. (The TL;DR history is that no one used to have last names here (except for aristocracy) and when Napoleon came around he let everyone choose their own last name. A lot of people chose stuff like their profession, or something about the area where they lived. Think how you'd refer to someone in a small town. Bobby the baker vs Bobby who lives near the dike.)

Anyways, a friend of mine had l.vandijk42 or something ridiculous like that. I think another friend had the last name "bakker", they were lucky because they had like 4 initials, i can't imagine how high some of those numbers go for common initials.

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TheGreatNico@reddit

Work at a hospital, we just switched to first initial+last name+number a couple years ago and I'm already seeing user names with 20 something after, like jsmith23. Kind of curious what happens when we hit 99 because we started at 01 and I doubt there's exception handling

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Bogus1989@reddit

LMAO reminds me of when I did the right thing, and requested for access on my personal account to our software center share, so i could get the .iso for our image to make a boot usb out of...they would only give me access to that one folder, and i argued i needed access to that, so when software center fails(like it does weekly) I can manually install stuff.....nope.

So then I logged into the that server with my admin account creds, and gave myself access. hey at least I tried.

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pixelpheasant@reddit

Oh, like the first five digits of New Jersey Drivers Licenses

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Hopeful_Promise_4872@reddit

I have my actual own name, no numbers or modifiers, on both gmail and hotmail, how old am i?

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ozzie286@reddit

I know that someone else must remember this story. A manager joins a company, finds out that the grey beard system administrator with the same first name as him has the firstname@company.com email address, and pulls strings and rank to get that email address for himself. Tons of reports and alerts are set up to go to that email address, and he has no idea what to do with them, so he ignores them. Things do not end well. Anyone know the story I'm talking about?

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Morlark@reddit

Y'know, it rang a bell, so I did a little bit of searching:

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/sho3kd/when_a_new_it_department_head_steals_the_prestige/

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ozzie286@reddit

That's the one, your searches were apparently more fruitful than mine!

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TinderSubThrowAway@reddit

I was just glad when 2 brothers left our company, both had first names that started with C, so our email and accounts are first initial, last name but instead of tagging a number on the end of the second one, they did first initial, middle initial, last name.

To top it off, their last name has a pair of Ls in it but it they had been here so long that it was longer than 8 characters, so their usernames and email only had 1 L in them instead of the LL. They constantly had trouble with people not dropping an L so they wouldn’t get all the emails they were sent.

I was seen as some sort of wizard when I was hired and added an alias to their emails to include the LL, one was in sales and marketing so it was actually problematic. Eventually when I redid the whole AD they got their full last names as part of their username. Still kept the single L email as an alias when we made the LL the primary though.

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Drywesi@reddit

Extremely minor point:

You want grizzled. Gristled would be 'covered in meat cartilage' :D

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HWKII@reddit

Who doesn’t want to be covered in succulent meat cartilage, though?

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fuknthrowaway1@reddit

I ran into an executive assistant that somehow had managed to get 'julie@company', so I asked how she got it past the hard ass fellow they had running IT.

Julie: Well, at the time there were only five of us. Mark , Tom from CS, Robby and John from Shipping, and myself. Tom thought using first names made it feel more personal.

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fuzzusmaximus@reddit

My last job went through renaming all the admin accounts to something that didn't include admin. I fought and resisted until I was one of the last ones. At that time the account was at least 15 years old and I was one of the very few left before centralizing all of IT.

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Caching247@reddit

We do first three letters of first name + 3 digits that increase incrementally by 12. (Spaced to limit having 100, 101, etc.) Prior to this we had initial + last name. Every time there was marriage or divorce there was an email change. No more email changes now.

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largos7289@reddit

Well if anyone runs across a server or print server named bubbles you're welcome. It's homage to the guy that taught me sysadmin'ing. He always named one of his servers bubbles. So when he retired i took over the mantel.

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BrokenByEpicor@reddit

My UPN has changed due to email format changes, but my SAM account name remains old school

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katarh@reddit

Yep, everyone knows I'm an old fart where I currently work because of my very very very ancient looking email address. I worked there part time briefly in college back around 1998, then got my career job in 2015 long after the email addresses had changed over to a newer format.

Everyone else is boring first initial lastname +numbers, and I'm sitting around with a cute early Internet handle.

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weHaveThoughts@reddit

Do you still have “jedi@company.com” ? Or Padwan+Name@?

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Kardinal@reddit

It can be fun to be the email admin sometimes and give yourself some very silly aliases.

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weHaveThoughts@reddit

I have claimed buildings which IT was located in which were separate from the main office on Google Maps and named them with Death Star, LLC and various other names.

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SperatiParati@reddit

Our old naming scheme was department+status+initials.

About 20 years ago we stopped changing account names when one (or more) of those details changed.

About 15 years ago we changed to a random set of letters and numbers (excluding vowels) as the obvious issue of people complaining when initials couldn't or wouldn't be changed post divorce started to really hit.

Any "old style" usernames really mark you out as a long time staff member.

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RefrigeratorNo3088@reddit

I have one site that's old enough we have people who have been set up under every phone labeling / standardization convention the company has had in the last 12 years, makes it a good example to others for training. Finally getting approvals to fix things.

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Afraid_Baseball_3962@reddit

The oldsters at my current company have two-letter company initials+first initial+last name. Everyone hired in the last decade is just an 8-digit employee ID. But there are still a bunch of folks who've been there 25 and even 30+ years, so it's a weird mix.

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panopticon31@reddit

At my last job I was one of the 6 or 7 old heads my email was just first name @ instead of first intitiallastname @

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Fallingdamage@reddit

Oh that's kind. When we cleaned up and organized our org, old rando accounts/users had their UPN/SAM updated as well.

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BilboBagonuts@reddit

What’s the point of a naming convention if you end up with a bunch of exceptions, right?

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jstar77@reddit (OP)

That's the best things about standards you've got plenty to chose from.

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Beneficial-Gift5330@reddit

A company I worked at was famous for long tenured company men. I was new, and the current iteration was first name initial + last name initial + combo of three numbers. The older people 10+ years were first + last + number. We had a guy on our team who had first initial and last initial (x2) and that was because the systems required at least 3 letters to log in back when he started. He retired after 48 years with the company.

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