Ex-Tabula Rasa

Phils

I mentioned not too long ago that a fourth person had joined my company with the same name as me. Yesterday I discovered that this wasn’t actually the case; he’s the fifth. Three others in different offices in the UK, and two now in my office. Apparently the new guy (a broad-shouldered VP bigwig fatcat) is also a Brit. So we’re all British, I guess.

He starts on Monday. He’ll be my best work friend’s new boss. She’s calling him Good Phil, which makes me Evil Phil. In the last seven days I’ve had one IT guy, two HR peeps and a commercial director make half-joking complaints about the fact that I have such a common name. “Thank your deity it’s not worse,” I told them all. “My Dad has the most common combination of first-name-surname in the English-speaking world.”

Eight years ago, when I flew out to Japan on the JET Programme, I got two different itineraries from the organisers, both different. I called them up, and they checked. Yup, another namesake was flying out to live in Japan, on the same exclusive teaching program, from the same airport, on the same day. They had to put a special note on the tickets when we picked them up.

I got two emails at my firstname-middlename-lastname gmail address today. One was from a California toll road company thanking me for submitting my evidence and agreeing with me that I was not responsible for the above referenced toll violation. The second was a flight confirmation for my flight from California to Seattle. Both were addressed to someone with the same middle name and last name, but Phillip instead of Philip.

I Googled this other guy’s name, with his extra letter. The first result that came back was the mugshot of someone with that name who was arrested earlier in the year for stealing a car. They weren’t in California, so it could have been a completely different person with the same name. Sucks to be him, eh?

Why I’ve got two emails in one day that were intended for this Californian with almost my name, I don’t know. Perhaps today he just forgot how to spell his own name. I’ve sent an email to the address I think they were intended for, asking if they should have gone there.

For a while I was worried that something fishy was going on. The California - Seattle flight was purchased in someone else’s name. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet I discovered that it was bought by a Seattle-based colon specialist. Sucks to be Phillip, I guess.