Yeah, it can be problematic at times.
For example, my own, "DWise1", has drawn more than its share of flak, even though its origin is completely mundane. Would you believe that when I emailed Kent Hovind about his totally bogus solar-mass-loss claim, he
twice tried to pick a fight with me over my DWise1 email name?
Here's the mundane story. On most companies' computer systems, you are given a username which is usually your first-name initial prepended to your last name, or at least to a set number of letters of your last name. This gave rise to a joke in one classic (meaning very old, from several years ago) Dilbert cartoon in which that perennial trouble-maker, Brenda Utthead, kept on trying to get her username changed. OK, so at Hughes Aircraft in the 1980's my username was dwise. We were also starting to use the new first-generation MacIntosh computers and laser printers; we really liked the Paint program with which we were able to combine graphics and text -- hey, this was 1985, after all! And our Macs were all diskette-based, which was way cool to us, because the different-colored 3.5-in floppies looked so much like the data cartridges on Star Trek:TOS ("The Original Show"). So I had my system diskette and my data diskette, and I labelled my data diskette with my username on the company's VAX-11 minicomputer, dwise. But then when my data files outgrew my one data floppy, I had to create a second data floppy, dwise2. So I renamed my first data floppy, dwise1. Then one day at work, a co-worker looked at my dwise1 floppy and started laughing. It had never occurred to me before.
So when I first signed onto AOL and needed to come up right there on the spot with a username, I remembered that one day at work and DWise1 was born.
So, if there's a particular message you want to convey, then keep that in mind. But whatever you do come up with, also think about how others could misconstrue it.
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