Individual among masses

I happened to possess very common first name. According to PRC (Finnish Population Register Center that is -- Not the PRC that Asians would expect) I have 56 426 namesakes, which is quite a lot when comparing to the total population of 5,4 million in Finland. Especially common the name has been for men born in 70s and 80s.

In my work context this commonness of my first name was emphasized due to disproportionate relationship between men and women in my line of nerdy work and also due to the fact that most of my colleagues have been born in notorious time frame mentioned above. This has resulted in more than every tenth colleague in my department being my namesake! I often joked that proper name must have been a recruitment criteria. Just before relocating, the final nail on the coffin of my identity crisis was realization that I supposedly had a doppelgänger portraying the role of Dr. Who from a particular season.

Fast forward to the Little Red Dot under the equator. Here I was awarded a completely new digital identity within the corporate systems and my Finnish identity was laid to rest for the duration of my assignment. In practice I  received for example a new external email address. This new identity is in the form of firstname@company.sg -- no need to separate with last name as I am the only and actually the first of my kind working in this location!

I needed to come all the way here to find my long lost identity. I am currently the odd one out of my department. There is actually only one other European that I know of among my whole extend group of colleagues around. It is funny that for example the security guy in our office building occasionally walks around the floors and every single time he happily greets me with my first name. They really didn't do that in Finland, even though just by guessing they would have been correct every tenth time.

However I have found a new group of names I am being referred to. Occasionally when I have booked a taxi (there is a cool little taxi booking app, which actually shows the geographic location of the booked taxi once the booking has been confirmed), the driver looks at me funny and wants to verify that it really was me who booked the taxi. They all say that they were expecting a Japanese woman because of my first name...