To a certain extent, we all have our destiny encoded into us – medically at least – as Crick and Watson discovered when they revealed the structure of our DNA. Some people also believe that our future is written in the stars, or at least those in the sky at our moment of birth, which is why Astrology is so popular. But what of our name – is something coded into that as well?
Those of you who do Pub Quizzes will have encountered the round where the quizmaster produces a list of anagrams of celebrity names and asks us to identify them. We are amused by some, for example: ‘occasional nude income’ reveals Madonna’s full name (Madonna Louise Ciccone), ‘go gets beer’ becomes George Best and ‘O Dear, I’m a gonad’ is Diego Maradona. Some others may be a little more profound, such as ‘old west action’ (Clint Eastwood), ‘got St Leger tip’ (Lester Piggott) or ‘genuine class’ (Alec Guinness). But it’s the ones that are a little too close for comfort that cause us to raise an eyebrow. Who would have thought that the anagram for Osama Bin-Laden would be ‘a bad man – no lies’?
I enjoy word games, which is why occasionally, when I receive a letter from someone I don’t know, I play around with the name to see if there’s an anagram in there somewhere. It is quite unusual to find one, and particularly one that fits the scenario. Which is why an e-mail received from eBay today was particularly enlightening.
You will probably all have heard of the recent security debacle that compromised the personal information of all of their 128 million users. Being eBay, of course, they took nearly three months to admit to the problem before issuing a bland statement, hidden away on their website, advising us all that there was little to worry about, nothing important was taken, but we might want to think about changing our passwords on other sites where we had used the same one, just in case.
Then, when the media got hold of it and the regulators started taking an interest, their management, presumably prompted by corporate lawyers in panic mode, instructed us all to change our passwords immediately. No choice, if you don’t change you don’t get on the site – as if it was the users’ fault and not theirs.
The poor guy who drew the short straw of having to tell us all of this was their President of eBay Marketplaces, and he signed the e-mail. It is unusual for any eBay employee’s name to appear on direct e-mails from the company, which are normally unsigned. It is even more unusual for there to be an actual facsimile signature, so presumably this time it was felt necessary to provide some gravitas – to reassure the recipient that this was a real person of authority talking to us.
This echoed slightly of the old Readers’ Digest prize draw letters, signed by the infamous Tom Champagne who, of course, was a made-up name. I played the anagram game and the result was quite a surprise. Surely, I thought, a company would not play games with its customers at such a time, so I googled the executive’s name and, thankfully, he is a real eBay executive who has worked for the company for around three years.
Nevertheless, it goes a bit beyond the realm of co-incidence when you see that the anagram from his name is:
GIVEN NEW I D
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