An Email Many People Would Strive For

We have a program that generates user logins and a company email after someone who needs to access it fills out a form on our account creation site. Normally, it will use your initials, then your department acronym or the acronym of the department that has contracted you to work for our company, and if you’re an outside contractor, then the initials of the company you work for.

I’m sitting at my desk with my coworker at her desk next to me, only half paying attention when a young woman walks in behind one of our HR reps. I hear the HR rep tell my coworker we need to change the young woman’s email. This happens occasionally, normally because some mashup of the characters adds up to a swear word, or the person will be using the company email to email non-personnel and needs to be more “professional” than our seemingly random jumble of letters. I don’t look up until my coworker starts cracking up, as do the HR rep and the young woman. I scoot over to see why.

The young woman’s name — changed for privacy, but initials kept the same — was Donna Olivette Nguyen-Orson.

The department she had been contracted by was the newly-created Reservations and Event Planning department; this woman was an events planner and was coming on board to streamline our company’s corporate events and travel for the next few months while they hired out a full department of staff, since they’d just given these things their own department. She was the first to get the email address containing the REP acronym.

Her company’s initials? L and Y.

Using our usual protocols, our automatic generator had happily pinged out the email address:

donoreply@[website].com