School Admin insists on name-based email address policy, teacher gets unfortunately inappropriate email upsetting parents: 'I went ahead and followed orders'

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Brad Dickson • Managing Editor
Mar 17, 2024 10:00 AM EDT

When I was a wee lad entering into the 6th grade, the middle school I was attending had an unfortunate naming convention for our usernames that consisted of the first five letters of your last name followed by the first three letters of your first name… Naturally, my username was thus "DicksBra." Now, you can imagine how much fun we, a group of 11-year-old boys, had with that. Any time my username was required, it was gleefully announced or entered to the tune of stifled laughter. I'm not sure the responsible adults involved ever realized what the joke was or even would have cared, but surely at some point, a good-humored teacher had a good laugh.

It seems to be a thing that no matter the naming convention for usernames or email addresses your organization adopts, you're going to end with some funny, inappropriate, or downright offensive names. So, as with anything else in life, flexibility is key, but flexibility isn't a trait that school administrators are necessarily known for, which creates problems in certain situations like my own and in the story below.

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    ages" to="/products.aspx?category ments" to="/products.as ions" to="/pro gor Solution Explorer Properties Server Explorer Lego XML Document de (UTF-8) I. P.Freely@school.edu \Mi
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    r/ r/MaliciousCompliance 2 hr. ago • Worldly-Leg-74 Usernames must follow district education policies At my first job decades ago, as the junior employee on the IT staff for a school, I was in charge of setting up email addresses for new teachers. The district had Microsoft Exchange for email and the education policy was that all teacher email addresses would follow the same format, first initial then last name, unless we had another teacher of the same name (which never happened, because we onl
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    However, we did have a new teacher - Greg - Roper who I decided to just set up as simply "roperg". Once all the new usernames were set up, my boss, our bureaucratic assistant principal, reviewed them all and sent me a short note, telling me to fix Greg's username to comply with the school's standard format. Well I didn't see the note until my next work day, and by that time principal's assistant had left for a vacation to Hawaii. Facing a deadline to publish all the emails for the school website
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    Username changed to "groper", email set to groper@washingtonunified.org*. Pushed to production. And everything was quiet for about a week. But then students began to receive their welcome emails, directing them to contact their teachers using the newly assigned email addresses.
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    Next thing I knew, I got an urgent, slightly flustered call from the principal himself. I printed off that email directive from the assistant principal, and went up to the principal's office, where I found both of them sitting side-by-side. Apparently, several concerned parents had already contacted the school, questioning the appropriateness of the teacher's email address. The assistant principal, still tan from his vacation, started to low-key chastise me for not catching this sooner.
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    Well his sunburned face turned even redder from embarrassment when I plopped down the email thread from a week earlier, where he explicitly asked to make Greg's email comply with school policy! The principal's expression was priceless. The assistant principal left with his tail between his legs, and I had a new email, "roperg," created for the teacher that afternoon. Greg was so grateful that he actually took me to lunch, joking that it was the least he could do after the crazy ordeal.
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    CoderJoe1 . 2h ago Did you survive that lunch ungroped? 13 Reply ↑ Share
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    GrumpyCatStevens 2h ago My own company had to make an exception to our email username convention for a fellow by the last name of Watts - because his first name began with a T. They decided to include his middle initial. ☆ 1 Reply ↑ Share
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    Vergenbuurg • 1h ago It's way out of my lane, but when I saw the name of a new employee that was being onboarded, I approached IT and recommended to not use our regular naming convention. Nope, they ignored me, and we got p.nis ↑ 1 B Reply ↑ Share
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    . hotlavatube 1h ago Ha! I once made the mistake of assuming a similar schema by my university. We were a small university, so most emails were just our last name, or our last name and our first initial. Our first assignment of a class was a group project, and I didn't have one student's email yet (let's say John Harry Samson), so I just emailed something like "samsonj" at the server address for our university.
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    I got a response back from a confused girl, Jane Samson, who had missed the first day of class, but said she'd do the best she could to support the project. It turns out due to a name conflict, the student I needed had been assigned the email "samsonjh".
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    Incidentally, our database professor and his wife (also a computer professor) broke the university's database. The university used [Last Name] [First Initial] [Middle Initial] as the database key. Their names were something like John S. Smith and Jane S. Smith, so their names both mapped to SMITHJS. As a database prof, John was not amused... 413 Reply ↑ Share
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    stillnotelf 2h ago • I've known a "mrpric" (mister ) made via one of these policies. I guess you could be generous with "mister price" but we certainly weren't. B1B Reply ↑ Share
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    Mom Of Moe 1h ago I doubt that there exists anyone much more stupid than a self-important school administrator. (I come from a long line of education professionals, and know very well that some are better than others.) I'm glad you were able to deflect the blame to where it belonged! ↑ 1 Reply ↑ Share
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    • craZboy87 59m ago Had one once with the same scheme, Sean Hart. Nobody ever complained, but the person didn't last long before they offboarded them entirely. +1 3 Reply ↑ Share
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    mysteresc 1h ago Reminds me of a Dilbert strip along a similar theme, where the character with the unfortunate email address was Brenda Utthead. 213 Reply ↑ Share
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