Name the problem!

When you move to a new company, the things you look forward to the most are the paycheck and the email id. And trust me it does help to have a short and compact email id. Because at the end of the day you are just another email id in the company records and people actually do find it easy to send you a joke or a forward if you are either a girl or have a short email id. So when i moved to Bangalore i thought i would get a good deal on both these vital parameters. I won't deal with the first one but most definitely will give you all the low down on the mail id front.

I read that 'a rose is a rose is a rose'. But it most certainly wouldn't be named a Rose Perumpramalil Chellappan for all that i know of!! A long surname and a longer middle name is the perfect scenario for the evil admins at companies to have a laugh at your expense. All they need to do is to give you an official email address with all of the name in it. The poor unsuspecting guy has to deal with the trauma and trust me it takes days to get over it. Imagine how Sreejith P C would look when u expand it to FirstnameMiddlenameSurname! I wouldn't be surprised if you run out of memory while imagining that. And the evil IT gremlins didn't even give me a delimiter between the names. So my official mail id is just a continuous lump of 31 characters. And no, i didn't use word-count to count that. The only good thing the admin did was that they were able to fit the whole id on my visiting card.

That's when i pondered over this name thing and realized that there used to be a time when names actually meant something. My father's middle name is "ottaplavunilkunnathil"! Phew, am i glad my grandfather didn't name me!! Anyway my dad's middle name translates to "where a single jackfruit tree stands". Now i am guessing the name stuck because he lived in a household where there were lots of other trees but only a single jackfruit tree. So if you were in some remote village in Kerala 100 years ago and wanted to visit my home, then all u had to do was to look for a house with not two or three but just one jackfruit tree. Pretty simple eh? Who needs GPS and technology!