Joseph Chen
It might sound kind of dumb to write about this, but throughout my life I have found, to my dismay, that there are many other Joseph Chens in this world. It only figures, because Chen is one of the most popular Chinese names, and Joseph is a Biblical name which is also very popular, at least in the Western world. So I guess my mom and dad, in addition to the many other mom and dads named Chen, put the two together and a brand spankin new little Joe Chen is born. People named David Kim or Esther Lee probably know exactly what I'm talking about here.
One of the guys my Dad did business with in Taiwan when I was little was named Joseph Chen, and I remember he had a business card which I always wanted to get. What a 8 year old kid needs a business card for, I don't know. So back then and there, I knew there was another Joseph Chen in this world, which I guess might have seemed cool for a little kid. Then, when I lived in Taiwan my freshman year of high school, there was a guy named Joseph Chen there at Taipei American School, who happened to be the same year as me too. Even better, the lockers there were assigned by alphabetical order so his locker was right above mine. Suprisingly, though, our paths crossed only a few times that year. I think the longest conversation we had went something like this:
Him: Oh, so you're the other Joseph Chen I heard about
Me: Yep, that's me
Him: That's kind of weird, man
Me: You don't say
Him: Ok, well vote for me, Student Council Treasurer next week
Me: Yeah, ok I will
Seriously, that was about it. And even that much was somewhat awkward. After that, I don't think I met any more same-name buddies in person. But recently, when I was trying to sign up for a new email account to replace my students UIUC email, I ran into some problems. I think a lot of other people basically just transferred their students ID to a yahoo or hotmail ID. Pretty standard, really. (that's a line from Dr. Evil, if you didn't know. Austin Powers III, July 26th anyone?)
Unfortunately, it didn't work out that simple for me. First I tried entering "jychen@yahoo.com" but that was taken. "Fiddlesticks," I cursed... but to no avail, someone else got there before me so what could I do. Yahoo is pretty big, and to be fair, they probably weren't all named Joseph Chen anyways. I figure there's got to be quite a bunch of Joshes, Jameses, Jeffs, Johns, maybe even a couple Juwanna Chens too. So I moved on and tried "josephchen@yahoo.com" but that didn't work either. Now I was kind of mad. I thought about hunting down that kid from TAS cause it was probably him, but common sense won out.
The last straw was when I tried "josephychen@yahoo.com," and that didn't work. No, I am not joking. I wanted to throw the computer out the window. Someone else is named Joseph Y. Chen, and registered his name on Yahoo??? What kind of crap is that! I was getting so mad I couldn't think straight, and I even tried to rationalize that maybe there was someone named "Josephy Chen" before I realized that I was losing it. Yahoo was no help either, they offered me the accounts "josephychen1980@yahoo.com" and "josephychen1@yahoo.com" as alternatives. Yeah right, like I'm gonna be that desperate to use an email like that. "josephychen@yahoo.com" is already more tedious than I wanted, why would I sink even lower to be "josephychen1"?
So in case you are wondering what I ended up doing, I just stuck to my original "dudo509@yahoo.com" account. Yes, good old dudo509, lets just hope nobody else gets that nickname. So my resume now lists "dudo509@yahoo.com" as my email, which probably doesn't sound too professional, but if potential employers have a problem with that, I don't really care anymore. They can email me at "bite.me@screwyou.com" if it makes them happy. I'm definitely not going through any more of this stress just to find a more official sounding address.
