Rosario Monachino
A woman’s name has been ‘ruined’ thanks to Amazon – and now people make fun of her for it.
Naming a child is undoubtedly one of the biggest choices you will have to make if you decide to have children as it will be a title that will follow them throughout their lives.
While some might spend hours going through a baby name book to find that perfect name, others may choose to stick to a family tradition.
Some parents might even opt for a unique name – maybe after a location that has meaning to them or by combining two names to make something truly special.
One woman, however, feels that her name, one that she once loved, has been ruined – thanks to an industry giant.
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Amazon was founded in 1994 and was initially launched as an online marketplace for books, but, by the end of the decade, it was selling pretty much everything.
Nowadays, it has branched into many different fields, including film and TV, music, and games.
In 2015, Jeff Bezos’ company launched one product that you will probably find in most households.
The virtual assistant, which has reportedly sold more than 500 million times worldwide, is a handy device that answers almost every question – such as “What ingredients do I need to make pancakes” and “What will the weather be like in my area tomorrow?”.
But while the device has been extremely popular from launch, one individual in particular has suffered from it.
Writing a personal, first-person piece in Business Insider, one woman has detailed how her life has changed since the Amazon product hit shelves.
“Growing up, I loved having my name,” she explains.
“Aside from a brief first-grade obsession with the name Rebecca, I’ve always been happy with it and never had a reason to feel otherwise.”
That was until 2015 when Amazon released a device that shared the same name as her.
The woman in question is called Alexa Nizam.
She said that, at first, people would ask if she minded having the same name as the robotic assistant – and, at the time, she didn’t.
But a few years after the device’s release, they became more popular and Alexa shared that she ‘couldn’t go a few hours’ without someone making a joke about it.
Nizam continues: “I worked at a department store in 2018, and at least once a day, a customer would make fun of my name. ‘What’s the weather today, Alexa?’ ‘What time is it, Alexa?’.
“Some would even say things like, ‘I bet you get those jokes all the time’, as if they weren’t part of the onslaught themselves.”
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In the article, she adds that her name would become a distraction during the pandemic when she attended virtual calls, as whenever someone said her name, their Alexa device responded in the background.
Nizam continues: “In almost every meeting, there would be a one-minute distraction for us to listen to Alexa say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m having trouble understanding right now…’ while everyone snickered to themselves and waited for her to finish.
“Then came a round of, ‘So sorry, that must be so annoying’, before we’d rinse and repeat on the next call.”
Despite the grievances that have followed her since 2015, Nizam admitted that she does sometimes have her own fun with the shared name.
One particular moment she recalls is when she was graduating college in Texas and moving back to her hometown in Los Angeles. She wrote on her cap ‘Alexa, play ‘Going Back to Cali’.
Fortunately, the jokes have started to slow down and she now often introduces herself as ‘Alexa, like the Amazon robot’ as an icebreaker when she meets new people.
“The most ironic part is that the Amazon device can actually be named something else,” Nizam adds. “In my own apartment, my device responds to ‘Echo’ instead of ‘Alexa’ to keep the chaos to a minimum.”
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