AILORW - What Does It Mean?

My very first email address was dingoe@hotmail.com. I established that address in 1997 at Kinkos in Van Nuys to keep in touch with a former coworker who moved to Alpharetta, GA. I purchased my first computer - an HP Pavilion 6330 - on August 28, 1998 at CompUSA in Torrance, CA. I paid $2,015.98 in cash for the computer, monitor, printer, Microsoft Office 97 and antivirus software. I got the computer home and chose America Online as my Internet Service Provider because they gave me a free 60 day trial and didn't ask me for a credit card.

I tried to register "Dingoe" as my screen name, but it was already taken, so I got saddled with Dingoe2.

I soon discovered what Dingoe meant online and I wanted to change my screen name, but couldn't think of anything else I could live with for the long term.

Eventually, I began using Yahoo Mail and Dingoe2 followed me. For a long time, Dingoe2 was my online identity, but I grew weary of the sexual connotation and the constant need to spell the email address. Then there was the embarrassment factor of Dingoe2 and my unwillingness to give certain people my formal email address.

A year ago, I decided to seriously identify with a name that was unique, nonsexual, addressed the spelling issue and could be given to anyone on a casual basis. I started thinking of the alphabet and eventually realized that some letters had unique sounds, while others did not. For example, B, C, D, E, G, P, T, V and Z all sound alike, especially during bad cell phone reception. I was fed up with spelling my email address, reminding people to add the "E" at the end as in Edward and the number 2.

I isolated the unique letters and came up with ILORW. I set that up as my new Yahoo email address. However, I discovered that GMail offered free POP3 and IMAP email with their service, so I tried to register ILORW with GMail, but they require a minimum of six characters. AILORW was born.

The cool thing about my online identity - it is unique, no one else wants it, I have to spell it out and each letter is easily identifiable even during the worst cell phone calls and it's nonsexual.