Many Internet Personae.

One of the problems with being old in internet years is that some of my current email addresses and AIM screennames are based off of words that I thought were, you know, cute and cuddly in middle school. It's a little embarrassing to have to tell customer service reps my email address to verify my identity. (HYPO: Them: And can I have your email address that we have on file for verification? Me: My email? Um, it's mrcuddlywuddlykins123@hotmail.com. Yes, that's w - u - d, right, d as in doggie, another d...)

See, for random arms length business stuff, I give out my crap email address so that the huge amounts of spam that I will inevitably get from their "privately" providing my addy to various solicitation mailing lists won't ruin my everyday emailing. I have a separate email for friends, family, and other important people relationships -- like my employer. And then I have my work email which is for strictly professional communication.

Finally, I've had enough. I created a new email account hosted by yahoo. I can't use gmail because I want it to be a relatively straightforward variation on my name so that service reps won't have a hard time understanding me, and my friends/family email is already, you guessed, a straightforward variation of my name on gmail. The problem is, yahoo has been around for such a long time that any variations I tried were taken. (Meh... it comes with having a fairly simple Asian name. I'm used to it. Makes searching for me on facebook an endeavor worthy of only the noblest of hearts.)

But, yahoo offers other addresses. First, I could do @ymail.com. I think that's a terrible idea. I think that gmail is go common, that lots of idiots, I mean, nice customer reps will assume that a "y" is really supposed to be a "g" and then you won't get that one email that says that your credit card bill is ready to be paid. The other choice -- which I went with -- is... @rocketmail.com.

Unsurprisingly, virtually all my variations were available. I can't tell yet whether this is any better than snufflesmcpickapocket@yahoo. Sigh.