Over ten years ago, I worked at an Apple Store and my job title was “Creative” but that pretty much just meant I spent all day teaching cute little old people how to use their new computers.

One day, this sweet little old man came in for a lesson (we’ll call him Bob). Bob wanted to create an email address so he could email his granddaughter.

We pulled up the page (let’s call it email.com) and Bob started to enter his info and he came to the username section and asked what he should put so I said “oh, you know, something like [email protected] but more unique because that’s probably already taken.”

In order to give him privacy, I was looking away from his screen when he finally proclaimed “I got it! I’m [email protected]!”

I was absolutely shocked, so I looked over at his screen and that’s when I realized Bob had become the proud owner of [email protected].

@Alice Great story! I was also a Creative for a couple years and I definitely had similar experiences helping non tech savvy people sign up for email accounts and other services… it was always super interesting trying to help them understand the scale of the internet and how unlikely it was that any simple username wasn’t already taken.
@michaelmcauley ❤️ them SO much. It took a lot of courage for them to be of that age, long out of school, and to be like “I am going to LEARN this!!”