A mouthful

I was chatting with my Dad yesterday and mentioned a recent development on my end: I FINALLY got an e-mail address at the organization I've been sort-of interning at for almost a year!

Now, before you go about congratulating me for circumventing the nonprofit org slow-growth attrition tendency and adding me to your contact list, let me present the problem. I worried this might happen when I saw that everyone else's e-mail addresses followed the template of [firstname].[lastname]@[organization].org And sure enough, the other day I was presented with this monstrosity:

elizabeth.shaffer-wishner@organization.org

It's bad enough trying to spell that name over the phone ("S as in 'Sam,' S-H-A no 'C!' F-F, as in 'Frank Frank,' E-R, hyphen, W-I-S as in 'Sam,' H-N as in 'Nancy' E-R.") Now, imagine this: "Elizabeth dot Shaffer hyphen Wishner at [organization] dot org. Do you need me to spell that for you?

Dad sighed, and opined that it might have been better to just pick one name or the other back on that warm summer day in July of 1983. I remembered my friend Dustin's unique question posed when we subletted an apartment together back in 2002: "Do you ever wake up and feel more like a Shaffer than a Wishner?" I realized: not at all. It's become one lump sum - and quite a lump at that!

I told him of my idea to combine the two: Take the SHA of "Shaffer" and the W of "Wishner" and become the classy Elizabeth Shaw. (Classiness, of course, subject to certain conditions.) In procrastinating just now, I took a look around the Interwebs and found this gem on Wikipedia. Thought you all might find this amusing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Shaw