Everything 2.0

This is my first entry ever on my first personal blog ever. After almost a year of blogging in our Company blog, I decided to censure myself as a private person from that blog. I will continue writing on blog.needish.com, but only in my position as an employee of Needish... and not as any random blogger writing about any random things.

However, blogging has become an increasingly addicting part of my life and this new blog will give the opportunity to air ideas, opinions and stories that I will no longer share with readers of that other blog. Also, this gives me the liberty of writing pretty much whatever I want... Bla bla bla...

So what will this blog be about? I don't know. But I'm sure it will be fun sometimes, annoying at other (fewer) times and hopefully also interesting from time to time.

I do know what this first entry will cover. My last name. I bought the domain www.hjertonsson.com a couple of weeks ago (still not pointed to this blog, but will be soon). As an internet-entreprenuer with ambitions I had to eventually create my own space in the cloud, and so why not conquer the family-domain at the same time?

Speaking of which, several times a day I am asked one or several of the following questions:

What is your name?

Can you please give me your full name?

How do you pronounce "that"?

Can you please spell it to me?

Again? Slower

Really slow...

So how do you pronounce that in Swedish?

Because obviously neither the Spanish nor the English pronunciation makes sense and people are looking for sense. They expect my name to be sensible. Its not. And its when I am asked to say it in Swedish it gets really ridiculous:

"I cant. I'm from the south of Sweden and we have a dialect and... well... I cant say my own name properly. I guess its something like "jättonson"

But its not and I sometimes wonder if I am one of just a handful in the world who on a daily basis fails to pronounce his own name in three different languages, including mothers tongue. Eg when spelling it over the phone in Spanish there are various sources for misinterpretations. Lets have a look at that:

H - A given

J - Too

E - Normally no problems

R - Cool

T - d?

O - u?

N - m?

S - f?

S - un f?

O - Cmon, you're kidding

N - Again? m?

I will try an analysis:

1) Mathematically

There are 7 possible errors. 2^7 = 1/128. Less than 1% probability of someone actually getting it right the first time. The nature of my life means that I in average need to give my full name away, over the phone, once a day. Give and take a few. So once every 4 months someone would actually get it right without repeatedly double-checking letter by letter until I ask them to read it back to me... and back and forth.

2) Empirically

It has happened once. When I die, if I die and if its what they say its like, I might very well get to experience that moment again as a highlighted moment of optimum communication in my life. Human 2 human understanding at its best. What an outstanding support-rep or secretary or whatever that person must have been.

There are just a few hundred people in the world sharing my last name and I think (and hope for their sake) they all come from Sweden. To collectively spare us from further suffering, I propose a name-change, as a group, for various reasons; Hjertonsson:

1) It obviously doesn't fly in English, key second language for Swedes.

2) Its supposed to be a cool name for only two big families but it still has a son-ending, so who cares. Its like Popuperez, instead of Perez, in Spanish. Or Hjongostewart, instead of Stewart, in English. At the end of the day, its just a fancy-feathered burp with a blue-collar ending.

3) Its too long. In todays world, with more and more people with shorter and shorter attention-span you want a last name, not a last essay.

4) It has (for obvious reasons mentioned above) no stickiness-factor. Networking is important these days, online and offline, and names like "Jim Love" tend to resonate more with the part of our brains that remember stuff.

So I reach out to all us miserable Hjertonssons out there, and I propose we submit a group-filing to the Swedish bureau of silly names (probably down-sizing anyway):

Haj

Oskar Haj. Its short and catchy. It means shark (yeah!) in Swedish and sound like hello in English (and Spanglish)

My logo (in a matter of just a few years, we will all need a personal logo for our online profile) can be a picture of a Shark. Or me surfing on top of a shark.

Simma lugnt

Oskar Haj