Spelling, Social Media, and the Kindness of Strangers

My life has included so many strange incidents that people often find them hard to believe. But I want to use the opportunity of the holiday season to share an interesting one that happened just this past month, and is so improbable that I still can’t believe it happened myself. It shows the power of social media and real-life, tight-knit communities to connect us in surprising ways.

To be Roy, or to be Roee?

I was born in Israel in 1979. (That’s me as a toddler, below.) English is a widely spoken language in Israel, but daily life is conducted in Hebrew, and things can become complicated when you switch from one to the other. For example, I was born with a first name that can only be properly expressed in Hebrew. It’s pronounced RO (like in rolodex) - E (like in eel). But no matter how you spell it in English, compromises around pronunciation must be made.

When Israeli children need passports, their parents must decide on the English spelling of their names. My passport was issued before my bar mitzvah in preparation for a trip to Romania with my grandparents, and my parents made the most popular choice at the time: to spell my name Roy on my passport.

I didn’t think twice about it until I was part of a young ambassadors exchange program from Israel to the United States in 10th grade. It was 1994, and the first city my school mates and I visited was Phoenix, Arizona. They all had very Israeli names like Shauli or Eli, but it was my name that got the most attention. People remarked, “Roy, we didn’t know there were cowboys in Israel!” and pronounced my name with an Old West twang. Delightful as it was, it didn’t sound right. I didn’t want to be called Roy, even though I knew it would be difficult for people to pronounce my name correctly if I spelled it any other way. So after I returned home I decided I'm changing the English spelling of my name. Doing some research I realized there's a plethora of spellings in English to this singular Hebrew name: Roi, Roei, Roie, Roey, Royi, Roee, and a few more esoteric ones in addition to Roy. Giving it lots of thought, I went with Roee which I thought would end up being pronounced the closest to the Hebrew origins.

In case you’re thinking that I suffered from a rare-name syndrome, you couldn’t be more wrong. My name was the most popular first name for boys in Israel from 1978 until 1982, as you can see in the fancy graph below.

Source: https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4480215,00.html

The mysterious Twitter account

I was not an early Twitter user. By the time I created an account in 2009, @roee was taken by a guy named Roee Mor. I envied him, but he beat me to it, fair and square. (I chose @roadler, which was kind of lame but still better than my other ideas.)

Interestingly though, the account wasn’t active in 2009—the last tweet was from 2007. I knew Twitter could shut down dormant accounts, so I came back every few months to see if the account was gone. But it was always there, and after a couple of years I stopped checking. Good for the other Roee, I thought. I’m not going to be jelly.

A change of scenery

Five years ago, my wife and I moved from Israel to New York City with our two daughters. One of the most important decisions we made when we moved was choosing a school for them. With our families and culture so far away in Israel, we chose Rabbi Arthur Schneier Park East Day School, a Hebrew immersion school, to help fill the gaps. It’s an amazing school connected to the Park East Synagogue, with a tight-knit Jewish congregation. It’s also a small school—there’s just one class per grade with about 12 to 18 students per class.

As we started getting to know the other parents, a woman named Karen Feldman reached out to me and said that her son’s name was also Roee, and that he was the only boy at the school with that name. She wasn’t sure she’d chosen the right spelling. I, of course, told her my entire life story and reassured her that she’d made the right decision.

My white whale resurfaces

It’s Thursday, November 22nd, 2018. Thanksgiving dinner just ended. I don’t know why, but I decided to check the @roee account for the first time in years. The most recent tweet was still very old, but something else caught my eye: The handle was still @roee but the account holder had changed the spelling of his first name from Roee to Roy. I thought to myself, This is a sign. I have to find this guy and see if he’s open to giving me the handle.

That night, I found him on LinkedIn and the next morning, I sent him an InMail asking if he’d give me the handle. I wrote that I’d be willing to give him whatever he wanted for it. (What can I say? I really wanted the handle.) To my astonishment, he responded a few hours later and told me that not only is he a WeWork member and a huge fan of the company, but he’d gladly give me the handle, not asking for anything in return. Most interestingly, he said that he did indeed recently change the spelling of his name, and explained his rationale (see his note below). It was fascinating—he went through the exact opposite transition that I went through! I couldn’t believe my luck!

Just when it seemed things were going my way

Roy sent me the username and password for the @roee account and we agreed to speak later that week. I couldn’t wait to make the switch; once I got the credentials I asked Clare Sheehan, WeWork Labs’ marketing manager, to help me do the switch on two laptops so it would happen as fast as possible. We even practiced switching two other accounts to make sure we knew the drill, and it worked.

We changed @roee to @roee100 on one laptop, and immediately after, on the other laptop, we changed @roadler to @roee. An error message popped up. The handle was too short. A Google search revealed that Twitter no longer allows handles shorter than five letters. @roadler stayed @roadler. We tried to undo the change and revert @roee100 back to @roee, but we got the same error message: The handle was too short.

Silence fell over the room as Clare and I looked at each other with the same realization: The @roee handle had been lost into the ether.

I had one more chance: The next morning, I asked WeWork’s amazing social media team for help. They tried everything, even getting me in touch with the relevant Twitter team, but we were told that the five-character rule is a strict company policy. (It’s easy to get upset at rules when they seem to work against you, but I assumed that there must be a good reason why this one existed.) I’d done everything I could think of, and I began to accept that it was destiny that I couldn’t have the handle.

A stranger appears

The next day, I attended my daughters' school choir concert at the synagogue attached to their school. As the kids prepared to begin and I made my way to my assigned seat, who should I see but Karen, the mother of the only boy in the school with the name Roee. She asked how I was and I told her the whole Twitter handle saga. She laughed, joking that she should be upset because I could have passed the handle down to her son one day. I laughed, too. At least I have another good story to tell, I thought.

But like all good stories, there was one final plot twist around the corner. When I arrived home after the concert, there was an email from Karen in my inbox. It turned out that she was seated next to another mother at the concert who just so happens to work at Twitter. Karen told the woman the story of the lost handle, and she said she wanted to help and shared her email address.

I debated whether I’d be asking too much of this person by requesting an exception to the five-character rule. As a WeWork executive, I know how it feels to have people reaching out asking you to bend the rules for them. I almost never do, and it always weighs on me, probably more so than it weighs on the person requesting the favor. When do I make exceptions? When the request exposes something that doesn’t make sense and seems to be an oversight, a missing nuance in some business rule, or just something that seemed right in the past but doesn't hold up now. This time around, I was dealing with the unfamiliar feeling of a request weighing on me from the requester’s side. I slept on it, and when I woke up, I looked at the situation from a new perspective. If any Twitter user with a short handle tried to change to a long one and realized too late that they couldn’t switch back, then the rule needed an adjustment. It was missing something like an “undo” button. As far as I was concerned, I was no longer asking for a favor; it was a feature suggestion from an active Twitter user who loves the platform. Armed with a shred of moral justification, I emailed her.

She understood my point, passed the case to the right team, and it was resolved. The @roee handle was restored and handed over to me. After nine years of watching the handle and wishing it was mine, it finally was. My precious.

This story may seem like a small win in the grand scheme of the universe, but the processes that made it happen are incredible. It started with a cross-cultural spelling nuance, continued with the power of social media to connect two people who’d never met, and finished with a tight-knit, in-person community where people have meaningful conversations and bond over heritage, education, and our place in the world. It’s a combination of the old pathways of connection and the new, of social media and local, physical communities. The most powerful things can happen when you reach out to someone you don’t know on Twitter or LinkedIn, or sit next to someone in a church, mosque, or synagogue.

And to Roy, Karen, and the Twitter team member: Thank you. I now have quite a bit of paying it forward to do.

I’d love to hear your stories about the power of connection and the kindness of strangers. Find me on Twitter @roee!