The trouble with being called Alexa

There’s no shortage of parents who failed to think through their kids’ names before signing the birth certificate. The kid in the year above at school called Poppy Field; the elderly neighbour called Stan Still. As a child, I spent a lot of time laughing with friends at those misfortunate enough to end up with a dodgy name. I never expected to end up with one myself.

For years, I was perfectly happy being called Alexa. Granted, no one had really heard of it before. Apart from my name never being spelt correctly at Starbucks, I was rarely troubled by it. Then, in 2014, Amazon had the wonderful idea to bounce off Apple’s successes with Siri and produce their own virtual assistant, the Amazon echo, accompanied by its wake word, ‘Alexa’. Here is where my plight began.

It started small. A little eyebrow raise and occasional questioning look was fine for me. This thing was never going to catch on. A virtual assistant? To tell you the weather and play you music? Yeah, whatever.

Then along came ‘That’s so sad Alexa play Despacito’. This nonchalant, nonsensical phrase asking the smart speaker to play Justin Bieber and Luis Fonsi’s hit song opened a floodgate of internet memes. I’m still not entirely sure where the expression came from but it now haunts me in the most menial way. Late to dinner because I only just missed my train? I don’t expect any sympathy from my friends. Instead the response is usually a quick smirk followed by a familiar phrase: ‘That’s so sad…’ For life’s everyday issues, I know the degree of sympathy (or lack of it) I’ll receive. And to this day, I still have ‘Unlikely to play you Despacito’ in all my social media bios.

Introducing myself at parties has become a minefield. Some people resort to singing the song at the top of their lungs, others jump in with a joke asking me about the weather today. I do try not to be a total misery guts about it. And rather than get angry, I’ve adopted a new approach: attempting to reclaim the joke. My Halloween costume last year was an Alexa. The effort was minimal. A shiny dress, cardboard logo and blue glow sticks around my neck, but you get the gist.

My name can also be impractical. Trying to have a professional conversation over Zoom can quickly run into trouble from the outset. All it takes is a simple greeting, ‘Hey Alexa! How are you doing?’, to cause chaos. Invariably my answer is upstaged by a louder, wittier one from my virtual counterpart.

Still, I can hardly blame someone for owning an Echo: I’ve got one myself, and for a while it was surprisingly amusing. But after three days of every shout for dinner being followed by the device kindly informing me that ‘Dinner’s Ready in Blackpool is 150 miles away and open until 8pm tonight’ we decided it might be sensible to change the wake name to ‘Echo’.

Maybe, I’m one of the lucky ones. As my mother diligently reminds me every time I grumble over another shoddy joke, my actual name is Alexandra. Worried I might be confused for a boy as a child, she opted for Alexa as my nickname over the more traditional, Alex. Years later, Amazon threw a spanner in the works. But despite all the jokes, I still like my name. And what’s more, while Alexa was far from a typical name growing up, it seems my name is even less common now. The Amazon Echo first came to the UK in 2016; since then, the popularity of the name has, perhaps unsurprisingly, plummeted. In 2016, 332 girls were named Alexa; in 2019, it was just 39. So on behalf of my fellow Alexas: ‘No, I won’t tell you the weather today’.