Me and My Number

I am lee39@fas.

It was a rude awakening. Before I came to Harvard I had expected to be christened jlee@fas or (@husc, as it used to be back in those days). But I should have known better, given Harvard's undergraduate population of 6,500, an Asian-American population of just under 20 percent and the popularity of many common Asian surnames--particularly those of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese origin. So when I hit enter, the account registration program instantly informed me I was "lee39."

Initially I was revulsed by the "39" dangling like an awkward appendage after my last name. I had become part of the assembly line of Lees in the Harvard factory.

I requested a change to jennylee@fas, a name which fit nicely into the eight-character limit for accounts on the FAS network's operating systems. My request was denied because my full name is Jennifer and not Jenny. I was told that HASCS changed e-mail accounts only on certain occasions--for example, when the resulting login name was a profane word in another language.

As an applied math concentrator, I was upset by the 39. The number 39 is ambivalent in search of an identity. Unlike its numerically more unique neighbors of 37 and 41, it isn't quite prime. It isn't quite 40, a number which resonates with a comforting sense of stability and roundness.

But like all those with numbered e-mail address, I found that the number grows on you after an initial period of distaste. You bond with it. It becomes part of you. As we evolve into a digital information economy, in which numbers are easier to parse, sort and control, there is something alluring about a name-number hybrid identity.

There is also an inexplicable understanding with others who have a shared fate--a kinship of anonymity and functionality with which people with e-mail addresses like granade@fas and rawlins@fas will never identity.

Last week, someone yelled across the dining hall asking for my e-mail address.

"lee-thirty-nine!"

Her face lit up. "I'm chen-forty-eight!" she replied.

"I'm chan-seven," piped up another girl. And there was a sense of community right there and then.

I feel a bond with lee38 of Mather House (partially because we often receive each other's e-mail) and the now gone lee37, lee40 and lee41. These ties arise not only from proximity on the number line, but also from the simple mathematical relationships we learned to love in elementary school. One committee I worked on consisted of lee13, chen26, and me, lee39. We were united by the subtle understanding that our e-mail addresses shared a greatest common factor of 13. Sometimes love is in the numbers; one couple I know share the number 10 in their e-mail addresses.

E-mail nomenclature is a clumsy art--a balance of common sense, shared names, uniqueness and efficiency.

Of the 59 undergraduates listed with the last name "Lee", 15 have numbers in their e-mail addresses, ranging from lee2 to lee45. In second place are the 43 Chens, of which 13 have numbers. The student chen50 has the honor of having the address with the highest number presently listed in the undergraduate directory.

Many common Western surnames have also gotten numerical treatment. There is a smith30, johns17 (short for Johnson), jones6 and perez3. And even not so common last names have been merged into half-word, half-number 'borgs: ahmed2, malliar2, das2.

I suppose it could be worse. Jennifer Lees at other schools have been given more cryptic aliases. There is the last-four-digits-of-your-social-security-number approach at the University of Idaho, which yields lee9482@uidaho.edu. At American University, a Jennifer Lee goes by jl4027a@american.edu. And then there is the ever bizarre Jennifer Lee at the University of California, Davis, dubbed ez062867@rocky.ucdavis.edu.

And then there's my middle initial--but that's another story.