> turning the simple act of giving out my email address over the phone into an Abbott and Costello routine sounded like a good idea at the time

Hah! I've been dealing with that for a few years now -- my email is most of my username and spelling it out is fun for neither party.

I've considered getting the shortest, most phonetic-friendly email possible specifically for phone calls; something like a3gx@gmail.com but also want to self-host. It's a hassle!

I have an address specifically for that—it's just one letter and a few digits, redirecting to the main account. Works like a charm. Especially when the native alphabet in the country is not Latin and laboriously explaining which letter is which is a meme from the phone calls era. Whereas I can just call digits by the names in the local language, and everyone is familiar with hearing them.

Meanwhile, with my main-ish addresses, I've been told that they look like a random jumble of letters or a password. And once I've given one of them over the phone, took ten minutes easily—with confusion as to even how many letters are there.

With my domain name, I've been using a one-letter address for humans but have found it often confuses people; it doesn't fit the pattern they expect. So, I've been thinking of switching to domain@domain.tld, which is still obviously "special" but matches the regular pattern better (and I don't have to spell out <domain> twice).

A family member has firstname@firstnamelastname.com, which is super nice, but unfortunately my name and most variants are taken.

And Sharon still denies she wrote Black Perl. (It was Larry.)