Usernames

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

But what happens when the name turns sour and bitter?

Maybe if Bill had been a network admin he could have had an added extra dimension to this discourse on names.

In most Enterprise Networks we make the usernames simple. FLastname First.Last or some variation on a theme. Not like your Yahoo or Hotmail accounts where you might have sexymama73 as a username. If the Academic VP had Hotmama82@xyz.edu as her email address one might question her credentials.

So there we go with the variations of first and last names. For me it is easy. I am jXXXXXXX until the day I quit or am fired or otherwise handled by some HR process. But some of our female employees take various paths and in those traditional roles go thru those various episodes of names changes.

When I first started my current day time job we used Novell as our NOS and user account managment was somewhat of a burden. Particularly in the days before NDS back when bindery services ruled the day.

If you were that lady who was getting married and wanted to change from Jane Smith to Jane Jones and also wanted your username to go from jsmith to jjones, well, fuggedaboutit. It was hard to do. In fact it was impossible. Our only recourse was just to delete the old account and recreate with a new name and that was a lot of trouble for an overworked department.

The first time I ran into this situation a very sweet young lady approached me after her blessed wedding event and told me how she really wanted to have her username reflect her new married name. I am just a good ole Southern Boy and I appreciated her view on traditional names and was even more gratefully that she did not join the ranks of the PC horribly hyphenated crowd. Those people (and you know who you are) should just make a choice. Don't come to me with a last name of Epstein-Obberschmidt and expect me to make it work in our email and database systems.

But I digress.

The young lady was still in newly wed bliss and this was important to her. So I pondered it for a few seconds and said without much hesitation, "It really would be easier for you to get a divorce than for me to change your username."

Now in hindsight this probably sounded really insensitive. Although we all know I did not really mean for her to get a divorce so she could save my department (me) some work I was just speaking a relative truth. I could not change her username. I could delete her and recreate her but I couldn't just change who she was.

But that was then and this is now and we are in a better behaved Directory System. I can infact change usernames and the GUID of the user never changes. I can give you an alias. As matter of fact.... maybe I should create one for thehnic@xyz.edu.

It's not without some work. In fact if not done properly it can create many problems, but it can be done.

Several of the women who over time who have gotten married have maintained their maiden names on the username side and just chosen to have the SMTP email address changed. They will sign onto their worksation as jsmith and get email as jane.jones. And this is not a problem for the most part because they were Jane Smith for so long and it was the name given them by the parents that it doesn't bother them.

But the flip side of that is a little more complicated and that is where I grew a little saddened recently as I had to consider an entire episode of a name change gone badly.

In the event of a divorce and the female employee wants to take back on her maiden name they may not want to have any association with the pain and bitterness of the old married name. It would seem that just the process of typing jjones when jones is no longer the name brings back feelings that are better off left buried.

So it happened. I get that call and the situation is not good and the divorce was bitter and the ex-wife wanted a status mulligan if you will. So I did it. Easy for me. But the pain on the other side of that change was palpable.

I know people appreciate what we do. It's just like any other job. Has its moments of joy and pain. But could something so trivial as a username make someone feel that had recovered a piece of their life? If so, then yea me. Clickity clickity clack, here's your name back.

One could only wish it were that simple.