A few days ago, I heard a couple of familiar names in a news bulletin. As I learnt on listening more carefully to the next update, two people with the same names as people I knew from school had been convicted of a reputationally damaging crime (for reasons which should be obvious, I shan't go into specifics here). Inevitably I found myself having to go online just to check they weren't the same people, despite a faint trepidation if they had been.
Fortunately they weren't, I find myself typing, although of course that's a pretty self-centred way to look at things - the victims of the actual crime aren't going to care who the perpetrators might or might not have been at school with. It's fortunate for me and my classmates that there were even differences of spelling, although again that only makes things worse for people who do use the same spellings of their names. Anyway, I'm not sure what I would or could have done about it had these people proved to be criminals, but it did help to remind me that one of the advantages of having a common name is that you're less likely to be associated with anyone else who happens to have it. Though I was still a little cautious when I came to write this post on my other blog.
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