“Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!” -Madame Roland, French Revolutionary and Writer
Okay, that title is a bit more dramatic than the situation that I am talking about. I am Matt. My name is Matt. It always has been. Except for a little while, when for no real reason, I decided that my name was Matthew and everyone should call me that because it was apparently professional?
Initial Thought
My whole life, my name has been Matt, not Matthew. Of course, it’s always really been Matthew but no one, beside my mother when I was in trouble and one friend when she wanted to get my attention, has ever called me Matthew.
That being said, for some reason when I was in college, making a LinkedIn, thinking about applying to jobs and was trying to start my career, I decided that “Matt” was not the right professional sound, “Matthew” is my official name, therefore I have to use that. I guess as I think about it, it was because that was on my Birth Certificate and Drivers license and whatever that I should use my “official” name as my professional name.
So yeah, for my “professional” life, I was Matthew, prospective employers saw Matthew, my Github was MatthewMaginniss, same with LinkedIn and everything else I put forward. This meant that when I joined companies everyone called me Matthew. I would have to have the “just call me Matt” conversation which isn’t the worst but most of the times things would have already been set up as Matthew.
Annoyances at Work
My current company thankfully asked me my preference when I joined. We were a company of like 10-15 people at the time so I got matt@ company domain. Which in hindsight is hella cool because the next Matt to join got matthew@ even though he also never goes by Matthew.
Now because I had matt@ and he had matthew@, there was a hilarious issue. His GitHub username was mattlastname and mine was matthewmaginniss. Which means that when people tried to add the person matthew@ in the company to things like tickets and pull requests, I would be added and vice versa, they try to get him (matthew@) they would add me.
We became quite close, often removing ourselves from tickets and assigning the other. We would have private DMs and make jokes about it every time because it was so ridiculous. Eventually people figured it out and the confusion stopped happening.
Back in the day, my company used Slack for all communications, but after a while, someone decided that Slack wasn’t business-y enough so they moved us all to the Microsoft Suite. We now use Teams🤢 and when we migrated, a lot changed, but one of the things that I didn’t know was that you can’t choose your name. It’s set by the Administrator and thats it.
So, as the company kept growing, people kept calling me Matthew, I would have to let them know that I prefer Matt, something I never needed to do with Slack. Then, the Github confusion came back, it happened more and more. I didn’t put it together but more than a year later, after dealing with tons of people calling me Matthew, I noticed that this was because my official name in Teams was “Matthew.”
I requested a name change from our IT to change my name from Matthew to Matt. Once that happened, everything went back to normal. People started/continued to call me Matt, no confusions on Github and shortly after this I realized, or at least thought, “What the hell am I doing this for?”
Now
At that moment of “What the hell am I doing this for?” I decided to make a change. I am taking my name back.
My LinkedIn, GitHub, Email, Website, ALL that was Matthew. Luckily I owned MattMaginniss.com but I was previously just redirecting it to MatthewMaginniss.com but no longer.
LinkedIn, GitHub were easy, I changed them same day. Email easy but less simple because I already owned my email but with matt instead of matthew, the issue was that I was, in my infinite wisdom using matt as essentially a spam account. So I have been grinding through unsubscriptions for tons of things to clean it up to regain control. Then finally, the website, to update my website it wasn’t that hard. Swap what website points where, update the CNAME, change all the links on social media accounts, as well as all of the links on this website(NotEverythingButSomething) and mattmaginniss.com.
This post is essentially the end of it. I have updated the sites and links. I have swapped from matthew email to matt for official things.
My name is Matt, it’s always been Matt. I’ve never wanted to be Matthew or be called that but for some reason my brain got the idea that “My official name will be better for my career” or something stupid like that. This has caused a massive amount of very time annoyances but it is finally over. I am free of this Matthew tyranny that I set upon myself and I am back to just being Matt.