billpalmer.net

Excuse me, my email is not mack.com, it's not max.com, it's mac.com.

So I make a hotel reservation awhile back and I never get the email confirmation I was promised, so I call them up and they tell me that they did indeed send a confirmation to billpalmer@max.com. Oops.

Minor random slip-ups like that don't bother me on their own, but I've seen way too much of a pattern on this one. So much so that I've taken to spelling out the "mac" part of my email address anytime I'm giving it to someone outside the industry, because it seems folks just have that much of a mental block against being able to understand what "mac.com" might possibly be referring to. If I don't spell it out, I get quizzical looks, misspellings, and my hotel confirmations going to the wrong address.

I don't know if it's because these same people already have such a mental block againt the word "Mac" when it comes to computers, or because the word "Mac" is just too generic out of context to be recognized for what it is. There are Mack trucks, people named Mac (and Mack), and so on. Still, I don't know how they managed to come up with max.com. On the other hand, the letters C and X are right next to each other on the keyboard, so maybe in this case it was just a matter of a simply typo, which to be honest with, I have much less of a problem with.

But in any case, even in this new heyday for the Macintosh platform, it's a subtle reminder of just how little concsious thought the general public puts toward computers in general. Come to think of it, I'm surprised Apple has yet to offer up some kind of @ipod.com email address for iPod users. Certainly no one would misunderstand that particular address.