I am in the rather enviable position of having a reasonably unique first name. Weirdly enough, there exists the aptly named BHAUTIK physical analysis toolkit for FE analysis, which pre-dates my PhD but is quite close to my PhD topic! But that's not what this rant is about.

My surame, Joshi, from the part of India it originates from, is as common as Smith; it's a popular family name with a long history. Given that my first name is sometimes a little difficult for western tongues to process, given a choice, my username for email accounts is bjoshi; it's been this way ever since I got my first email address over ten years ago (incidentally, it's flooded with spam, but still going).

So when I was lucky enough to get invited to open an account at gmail, I created my bit of abstract real estate by choosing bjoshi as a username. This opened me up, however, to the new (for me) experience of getting a flood of misdirected personal mail in my direction. For some reason, people either can't enter their address correctly into a form, or just assume that the person that they are trying to correspond with has a gmail account and that their username is, well, bjoshi.

Amongst the flood of stuff I get:

• Password reset requests (yes, you, whoever you are, it's taken; stop trying)
  
• Numerous CV's and resumes
  
• Job offers(!!)
  
• Various emails regarding an internal SAP migration (whatever the heebejebus that is)
  
• Press releases from a lieutenant Colonel in Kashmir(!)
  
• Account setup information for an ADSL account
  

I often wonder who these other bjoshi's are.. it's nothing if not just amusement for me, but I'm assuimg that these unsuspecting individuals are losing out on something... I hope for their sakes that they get it sorted out. Whoever they are.