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Heh. I have a somewhat related story.

In the market we sell into, mergers, acquisitions and spin-outs are the norm. People shift employers all the time without changing offices. It's a whole Thing.

USUALLY this is somewhat drama-free, and USUALLY there's not an issue with email addresses, but this is not a story about the usual case.

Most places now seem to use the firstname.lastname@corp.com style of address. This is a good idea, and creates collisions less often than flastname@ style addresses would. However, one of my customers -- someone who had been happily a first.last@companyA.com user -- got acquired by an org that insisted on the old style flast@companyB.com addresses.

I will not provide the name of my customer, but the problem that ensued was of the same type, and yet a bit more severe, than it would have been if his name were "Steve Hithead."

To this day, though, his address honors the local convention. STANDARDS MUST BE FOLLOWED NO MATTER WHAT, apparently.






I worked at a place where legal swooped in and banished reuse of email addresses for an odd long period (like 7 years).

That created problems with contractors as any interruption in service required a new address. So we had a few John.Smith183@example.com in the org.


Hahahaha. I wish HN allowed the use of the joy emoji in response for these types of posts.

I imagine that certain people of a particular temperament might deliberately leave such a thing be, perhaps for their own amusement, or maybe because they consider it to say more about the company than it says about them. Is this individual such a person?



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