If you Googled Olexander Turin a few days ago, you’d probably come up pretty empty, other than a few social profiles, an assortment of non-American sites, and the like.
But if you Google the 20-year-old Ukrainian by his new name, you’ll end up with millions of results, full of product reviews, unboxings, landing pages, accessory sites, and more.
Turin, who entered a contest at his local electronics store, changed his name to “iPhone Sim” (sim is seven in Ukrainian) to win the phone for free. Paying just around $2 to legally change his name in Ukraine, Sim avoided the hefty price of the iPhone 7 in Ukraine, about $850 USD.
The store offered a free device to the first five people to change their name, with Sim acting fast to become one of the five, the AP reported.
Mashable noted that while the change “definitely won’t age well in his native Ukrainian, in English, Mr. Sim could easily be read as SIM, the acronym for ‘Subscriber Identity Module,’ the removable smart card inside mobile phones that contains cellular user data. Therefore, in combination with the word iPhone, Sim would essentially make his name evergreen, because every iPhone (for the foreseeable future) will indeed have a SIM.”
It should also be pointed out that Sim is lucky to have changed his name for this year’s iPhone model — had he changed it during the iPhone 6 release, his name would have become “iPhone Shist,” (shist is six in Ukrainian), which might not go down too well in English.
Sim told the AP that while he plans to keep the name for the time being, he might consider changing it back to his birth name when he has children.
Tetyana Panina, Sim’s sister, told the AP “it was difficult to accept that and hard to believe it’s true. Each person in this world is looking for a way to express himself. Why not to do that in this way?”
