Großklein
After I graduated high school in 1982, I spent the following school year as an AFS high school exchange student in Austria. This past weekend, I started scanning the hundreds of slides that I took during my year abroad, including the photo in this post of the village sign. Yes, I spent the year in a village called Großklein. For those of you who don’t speak German, groß = large, klein = small. Yes, I lived in big-little. Note that in Austria it’s common that if a new village springs up next to an existing one, they use the prefixes groß and klein to distinguish them. In the case, the existing village was named Klein.
My #FirstWorldProblem
I was a pretty early adopter of Gmail, and I got the username ‘stantaylor.’ Over the years, however, I have discovered that at least 3 or 4 other people in the world who share my name also think they have the my Gmail address–or at least people who are sending email to them think that they have it: one in Australia, one in the UK and at least one in the US. The latest is the one who signed up for Publisher’s Clearing House (TIL that PCL still exists). Or, based on the large volume of email that PCH has sent to this person at my email address, maybe someone who hates him signed him up, mistakenly using my email address. (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t someone who hates me because the emails are addressed to a different first name that shortens to Stan than my full first name). Another Gmail feature–filters–is saving me from the spam.