Didn’t know the rest of the world got Social Security #s…
“Okay, let me add you. What’s your name on here?”
“John-Smith, hyphenated instead of a space.”
“Okay… wait… I got a page full of results. Is this one you?”
“Nope.”
“How about this one?”
“Nope.”
“What’s your icon?”
“I have an avatar of The Blues Brothers.”
“I don’t see an avatar like that in this list… oh wait… there’s another ten pages of results…”
“@&$#!”
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If that’s true why do I always see people posting things that I would be embarrassed to see next to my name?
You just described the Steam friends list quite accurately.
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Hilariously, that was my inspiration. 
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I suspect being easily found is more likely to improve my life than cause problems. That may not always be the case, but has been so far. If I ever need to change that, I may be kinda screwed.
Actually, quite the opposite - your Social Security Number (or equivalent for other countries) should be a piece of private information known only to you and the Social Security Administration, and should be the key to a large set of unique numbers so you can give a different number to every different entity who wants to know your Taxpayer ID number. Yeah, your banks and your employers each need to have some number to use so they can tell the Tax Collectors how much money they paid you, but there’s no good reason for that to be a unique True Name that can be correlated with the other people who have to collect taxes on you.
And no, there’s not a chance of that happening. A unique ID number is a real convenience for lots of businesses, even though I don’t have any incentive for giving them that convenience. Even medical insurance ought to be manageable without a Unique ID Number linked to your True Name - the different doctors you go to could also use per-provider unique numbers to deal with your insurance companies, even though they do occasionally need some way to correlate with each other (e.g. if you go to the emergency room, there may be stuff they need to find out from your regular doctor.)
I probably should have used the sarcasm tag…
That’s me. I developed my username in high school, and spent a week doing it looking for a five letter sequence pronounceable in English that didn’t have google results. I failed, but decided to use the letter name for the “L” so if anyone’s curious about my username, it’s pronounced “ELL-Dobe” like a dyslexic elbow.
for me it’s like a dyslexic Albedo from now on
Until then, here’s a tool you can use to check if your preferred moniker is free or taken on various platforms:
Just recalled one of my favorite username jokes:
Well, that was an easy way to find out where I have accounts I forgot about! As well as to see that others out there has what I really thought was a unique nick!
I knew there was another one with my nick on Steam, even though I’d had this one for years before they’d even opened their account. It was a bit strange that Steam allowed someone else to use the nick, too.
Little Bobby Tables.
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