I share a name with a very famous professional athlete. I don't even think about it usually but as soon as I have to give my name to someone I can pretty much count on some remark about the athlete by the same name.
I've dealt with this in many ways over the years but my most recent method is to pretend to have never heard of that famous person by the same name. That makes the conversation awkward and they usually move on.
Also, if you meet someone who shares a name with a celebrity, keep these things in mind:
- There is nothing you can say about it that is funny or clever. We have heard it all before. Just don't.
- If you do have something to say about it that is truly original and absolutely hilarious, see the previous rule.
The only time I've even been aware of someone with my name is when Google started sending me alerts about highschool sports where "I" was mentioned. It's always from Florida or some similarly fairly-far-away place (I'm in Ontario, Canada), and certainly not me.
I've been involuntarily following this kids sports career just because Google keeps sending me emails about my name being mentioned. I wish the kid all the luck in the world. I hope he makes it some day.
He's far too small of a player to be known about by even the most avid sports fans in my local area. I'm somewhat aware of at least three more people with my same name, and one with my last name as their first name, and my first name as their last name.... I get their emails all the time; there's literally one letter of difference, as my last name adds an 's' to the name (think Steve vs Stevens... kind of thing. Neither my first nor last name is Steve or Stevens, but it's the same idea).
I've also gotten receipts for motorcycle parts in my name, shipped to someone who is clearly not me... again, for a location that's rather far from me geographically (in my inbox/by email). I've also had my email signed up for several school board mailing lists for counties that again, I don't live in, and have never lived in.... so that's fun. I used to try to email my email-address-neighbor to get the messages to them so they would know there's a problem and call the relevant people to have it fixed. I never recieved a response and the messages never stopped coming, so I tried to unsubscribe, and failing that, made an inbox rule to file them in the round "very important" bin ๐๏ธ
My name is rather unique, so I'm a bit surprised that even this much has happened to me.