Swedish surnames

A friend of mine here in Sweden told me a story about when he worked for a large telco here in Sweden and they sent him to one of their offices very far away to work for a few weeks. When he arrived, he was treated as a king and he couldn’t understand why. But after a while he understood that they thought he was the son-son-son of the founder of the company Ericsson since his last name was just that. Here we wouldn’t think like that since Ericsson is a VERY common surname here.

Another very common surname in Sweden is Nilsson, the second most common actually. Even so, more or less every week I hear somebody who thinks that one of my colleagues in factor10, Niclas Nilsson, is my brother. That’s not the case. I just wanted to work with him because he is brilliant and very nice.
:-)

Something I'm not that used to though is what happened the other day when Niclas met an old student of mine. My old student asked Niclas if I'm Niclas father! Hey, I'm not even three years older than Niclas...