How I accidentally became a German SRE
The strangest email I sent this year started with "Dear Data Protection Officer" and ended with a request to delete the personal data of someone who does not exist.
His name is William J. He's a Site Reliability Engineer at NebulaStack Technologies LLC. He lives on Königstraße in Rohrbach, Bavaria. His mother's maiden name is Weiss. He has a phone number, a date of birth, a complete address, and a surprisingly coherent digital footprint scattered across about a dozen websites.
I made him up. Not all at once - that would imply a plan. It happened gradually, over years, the way code accumulates when nobody's looking. One fake name here, a different address there, and somewhere along the way this fictional person's life became more documented than mine.
I didn't realize any of this until I tried to delete him.
The problem with twenty different people
It started the way these things always start: I didn't want to give a website my real email address. Then I didn't want to give them my real name. Then my real phone number. At some point the account wasn't downloading a PDF with my real birthday - it was downloading a PDF with whatever birthday I'd typed into a different website three years ago and forgotten.
The problem with lying to websites is that you have to remember which lie you told to which website.
For a while I managed it the way everyone does: badly. I had accounts with my real name. Accounts with a pseudonym. Accounts where I'd used a completely different identity because the form asked for a billing address and I didn't feel like explaining why my billing address and my IP address were 12,000 kilometers apart.
Then I forgot which was which. Every forgotten account became an archaeology project. Did I use my real name here? Was this the one where I lived in Alaska? Why does this profile say I was born in July?
Eventually I did the obvious thing: I stopped creating different fake people and started creating the same fake person. Same name. Same birthday. Same address. Same company. Same job title.
Suddenly I wasn't remembering twenty fictional identities. I was remembering one.
The profile that grew legs
Like any software project that nobody's actively maintaining, the profile slowly accumulated features.
I needed a company name for a service that asked for one. I typed something that sounded plausible. Next time I needed a company, I used the same one. Eventually it had a name, an industry, a website that I will never build.
Then I needed a job title. "Software Engineer" felt too generic. "Site Reliability Engineer" sounded like something you could put on a form without anyone questioning whether you actually knew what it meant. I didn't. He didn't. The form didn't care.
The address drifted toward Germany the same way - not because I have anything against Germany, but because every privacy-focused service I signed up for seemed to be headquartered there. My fictional person's location followed my real decisions like a shadow.
At some point this fictional German SRE had a more complete professional profile than most of my real friends. Better documentation, too. I kept a text file so I wouldn't accidentally contradict myself.
The only person who knows how to delete you
The strangest part wasn't creating William. It was trying to get rid of him.
I went on an account-deletion spree recently. Not because I think every company is evil - mostly because unused accounts are clutter, and clutter has a way of turning into problems you don't see coming. Every account is another password to remember, another email to recover, another database that still has your information.
I started sending deletion requests. Some sites had proper account deletion flows. Some required emailing their privacy team. Some didn't have a deletion mechanism at all, which is its own kind of honesty.
And every now and then I'd open an old account and find William waiting for me.
Dear Data Protection Officer,
I am writing to request the deletion of my account and all associated personal data. Name: William J. | Email: [redacted] | Address: Königstraße, Rohrbach, Germany
I sat there for a moment. I had just invoked the GDPR on behalf of a person who exists only in the transaction logs of websites I don't remember signing up for. The sentence was technically correct. It was also the most ridiculous thing I've typed all year.
The part I didn't expect
The thing that got me wasn't how many accounts I'd created. It was how many of them still existed. An ancient forum account from a username I haven't used in seven years. A test account on a service I evaluated once and abandoned. A profile on a site that I'm pretty sure went out of business in 2021, but its database is apparently still out there somewhere, quietly remembering a German SRE who never existed.
The irony is that William ended up better organized than my actual identity. Every account I made with his details matched perfectly - I had a text file, a system, a single source of truth. My real data is scattered across half a dozen devices and a memory that gets worse every year.
I still don't know if I should feel clever about this or mildly unhinged.
I've stopped making new accounts where I can help it. Fewer services, fewer logins, fewer things to remember. But William is still out there, sitting on some servers in who-knows-where, the ghost of every decision I made to not use my real name on a Tuesday afternoon.
I was going to delete him. But honestly, he probably has a better career trajectory than I do.