Jennifer Levy (10/28/2013)
I went to a women's college in the mid-'90s. In my dorm of ~60 women, we had 8 Jennifers, and that seemed to be the ratio across campus. Almost all used the common, non-"cutesy" shortened version of "Jen" so trying to get one's friend's attention in the dining hall would often lead to loads of us turning our heads. I eventually took the other half of the name to avoid the confusion.Unique names may be a pain because of misspellings and misunderstandings, but having to come up with a nickname to differentiate yourself from the thousands of identical names out there is also a pretty big pain.
And convincing everyone you interact with that you really do want to be called either your full name or your chosen nickname rather than the most common nickname out there seems to be Sisyphean. :rolleyes:
(And don't even get me started on the proper way to pronounce my surname. I've given up on that one.)
Even though I haven't had a class with someone with the same name as me since elementary school, a couple of people have taken to calling me by either my surname or my nickname and surname together.