Woman who loved her name had it ‘ruined’ by Amazon as people started making fun of her
If your parents did you royally dirty, you do have the option of legally changing it – or you could simply tweak your title like a ton of famous faces did after joining the showbiz world.
But this woman was seriously considering going by something else after experiencing years of ‘torment’ from people taking the p*ss out of her name.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out why she holds the online retailer, founded by Jeff Bezos, responsible for being teased.
But if the penny hasn’t dropped, it’s because the ‘virtual assistant’ device which Amazon put on the market in 2014 shares the same name as her.
The technology took the world by storm and every man and his dog has one in their home these days – but its popularity has been a huge pain for Nizam.
In an article for Business Insider shared last year, she explained that she ‘loved’ her name growing up, but that all changed when the gadget was launched over a decade ago.
“At first, the references were subtle,” Nizam explained. “While they should have gone with something more obscure, it hadn’t really affected me. I was so naïve.”
Alexa Nizam reckons Amazon should have gone with a more obscure name (Alexa Nizam)
She says she’s heard every possible Alexa joke under the sun over the years, but revealed she really had a target on her back when working at a department store in 2018.
Nizam continued: “Within a few years, the mentions really picked up. 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.”
She explained that she ‘couldn’t go a few hours’ without someone cracking a joke about her name – and it only got worse when the ‘Alexa, play Despacito’ meme came about.
Nizam said: “That cultural moment was the peak of my torment: I couldn’t introduce myself to anyone without having a dreaded Amazon moment.”
However, sharing the same name as Amazon’s gadget did allow her to come up with a good pun to write on her cap at her college graduation ceremony.
She went on: “I’d gone to college in Texas and planned to move back to my hometown of Los Angeles, so I decorated my grad cap to say, ‘Alexa, play ‘Going Back to Cali’.
“It felt like my one tiny win – if I had to be subjected to bad jokes for the better part of a decade, at least I could own the narrative for a brief, shining moment.”
She’s heard every ‘Alexa’ joke you can imagine over the years (Getty Stock Photo)
Still, her first name caused chaos throughout her daily life – especially during the pandemic, when everyone was constantly on Zoom calls.
According to Nizam, any mention of her name on one of these calls resulted in pandemonium, as a string of virtual assistants would start going off in the background.
She’s still dealing with that issue these days too, however, she is now ‘back to loving her name again’.
“If anything, being able to say ‘Alexa, like the Amazon robot’ makes it more memorable when I meet new people,” Nizam joked.
“It’s actually helped cut back on the misnomers I used to get all the time: Alexis, Alexia, and Alex are (mostly) a thing of the past.”
But she still believes that Amazon should have chosen a ‘more obscure name’ for its product, pointing out that the company’s competitors have avoided regular names with their personal assistant devices.
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