Try being a fat, bald, white guy named Jamil. I even had an aunt who called me Jamie (she even spelled it that way on X-mas cards) for years. I will answer to Jamal and any other remotely similiar vocal bastardizations of my name. But not f**kin’ Jamie.
My problem isn’t so much that other people can’t pronounce my name as that I apparently can’t pronounce my own. My meatworld name is “Britt.” Unisex, slightly unusual for a guy but not unheard of, e.g. James Coburn’s character in “The Magnificent Seven.” Nobody would read it and mispronounce it. However, it seems like everyone I say it to hears somthing else. I swear to God that I would be a multimillionaire if I had a dime for every time I had the following conversation:
“Hi, I’m (name). And you are…?”
“Hi, I’m Britt.”
“Brick?”
“No, Britt.”
“Brick?”
Yeah, that’s it. Brick. My freaking name is Brick. Brick Broadchest, private eye. :smack:
Hee hee. I like your name. I’m surprised people don’t say “Brett” though. Brett Fav-ra. 
I don’t think there has ever been a person in my entire life who mispronounced my name. There aren’t a lot of names more common. Except for my daughter’s. Her first name is in the top five for her birth year and her last name is in the top ten in the US. Poor girl. But hey, no one will ever mispronounce it. 
and I can cook rice on the stove top. Unless my mother is coming to dinner and then I inexplicably burn it giving her another reason to spend five minutes trying to convince me I need to add a rice cooker to my postage stamp sized kitchen.
See, my name is an unusual, if normal, name. Hanna. Granted, it’s spelled oddly (thanks, Dad!), but it’s still a name most English-speaking people should have heard.
Maybe one in five people I speak to manages to get my name correct the second time.* I get Anna, Deanna, Ann, Leann, Joanna. These are annoying, if understandable, since the second syllable is the same. The ones that really toss my cookies are the people who pick a random feminine name starting with “H” and go to town. I’ve had Heather, Heidi, Hilda and Henna (WTF! Who names their child after a dye? On second thought, don’t answer that.)
It’s gotten to where I’ll answer to Hanna, Anna, and Ann. My official “I quit” moment came when I was speaking by phone to a lady regarding a business matter and she kept calling me “Anna” and I kept saying “Hanna, with an H” and I got a letter from her a week later addressed to “Annah”. :smack: It’s either give up, or make everyone call me “Mrs. LastName” from now on.
*Purely for scientific purposes, I will hereby note that only about one in a hundred people manage to spell my name correctly the first time. That fight, I’ve given up on. Curses, prosthetic “H”!
What’s most common for me is people calling me by my last name. It sucks to have a last name that is also a first name. And in many places, it appears reversed, I’ll grant you. But how many people do you know that spell their first name with a comma?
I have a similar problem. My first name is Brendan, but apparently I don’t enunciate it clearly enough because I always have to spell it out to avoid being called Brandon.
Oh, another thing I’ve given up, with regards to names. I’m sick of the various fast food places that want to know my name when I order. I prefer order numbers. For one thing, no one is likely to have my order number.
I’m sick of the number of times that I have to debate with some other Mike about whose order just came up.
So now I go by Vladimir at these places.
posting again with my name woes (I’m bored.)
I’m Isadora. Isa. dora.
But since I’ve been small, I’ve been Izzy.
Problem is, people hear “Izzy” and they think “Isabelle” … so even if they actually know better, people who think it’s fun to call people by their full names always call me Isabelle.
Even worse now that Isabelle is really popular among the knee-high set. Everybody has a cousin or niece or grandkid named Isabelle and so they remember it that way.
I’m currently trying to get people to quit calling me Izzy both because of this and because it’s a baby name (which is, no doubt, why people take it upon themselves to call me what they think is my full name). So that particular fight has just started.
But in the meantime, I just answer to Isabelle.
I bet they come up with some pretty creative spellings. My name is moderately common but practically every cashier I give it to comes up with a different spelling.
The one I’ve more or less given up on is my last name. There are at least three acceptable spellings, but the one I use is always the last one people pick, even if they’ve been working with me for years.
My name is Gemma. Even that is too difficult for some people. On the wall at work, I have a list of every name I have been called. Gets longer by the day.
One of my daughter’s best pals since Kindergarden is Malik.
Not Michael.
Malik.
For some reason she always calls him Michael. Why? He once told her he wanted to have a “normal” name, like Michael. Ergo, Michael. Now when she says his name it’s more like “Mi-alik”.
When she was younger she wanted to go by the first part of her name (kinda) - Cassie. Until she was called Casey one too many times. Add that to her friends calling and asking for Cassie and I would completely blank her choice of name and reply that no one lived here by that name. Oops.
So she’s back to Sadie. Not “Sah-dye”, not Sandy, not Katie. Sadie.
I’ve complained about this before here. Places like Starbucks want your name so they can write it on your little cup and the world will be a little more organized. After having one too many experiences that went something like this, “A-n-g-e-l-i-q----- Q. Q. Like Quarter. Q. No, Q. Right. Ok, q-u-e”, I gave up and started just using Angel. Easy enough, right?
Oh no, the vast majority of the time, my cup will comeback with “Angle” written on it (just like most of my birthday cakes from the bakery when I was a kid). I will never understand this, as “angel” is a pretty common noun in our society.
I feel your pain.
My first name is Welsh, and therefore unusual. My last name is English (of Norman descent) and is also often a first name. Consequently, people insist on reversing them. I’ve had driver’s licenses and credit cards sent to me with my names reversed. I was even issued a replacement military ID, in which the person took it upon themselves to decide that my official record had the names in the wrong order and “corrected” it. The sheer number of people who feel that I don’t know the difference between a last name and a first name on a form is staggering. I had a five year struggle with the loyalty program of a national chain of book stores, during which I wrote letters, begged and pleaded with managers and eventually quit in disgust. Despite having my name corrected on more than a dozen occasions, I received only one piece of mail correctly addressed from them, out of perhaps 50.
Re: the Starbucks thing.
One of my friends is Pakistani, and her name would be quite common there, here not so much. Because of her Starbucks addiction, she’s assumed an alias for just that purpose. Because any idiot can spell “Jen”.
For me, people always try to shorten my name from Allison to Alice. Seriously, is anyone my age even named Alice? Allison (in all its horrid spellings) is way more common IME. It doesn’t help that I can’t STAND being called Alice, from all those “Alice in Wonderland” jokes in elementary school.
I always liked the joke:
-Liz: “Hi! I’m Liz!”
-Person: “Oh, is that short for Elizabeth?”
-Liz: “Nope, it’s short for Lizard.”
My name is Yale. It really shouldn’t be that difficult to say it, but I get Dale, Gail, Neil, Jim and once Steve. BUT when they find my name is Yale, they invariably ask if they can call me Harvard (I tried short-circuiting this joke on a person, but they looked VERY disappointed at the realization that they were not the first to think of it).
I have similar problems. Somehow I get “Natalie” or (more recent but less common) “Natalia” instead of my given name, Natasha. Thing is, half of these people who did it were people who’d known me for a while and continued to do it after years. :smack: At least it’s not as bad as the problems people have with pronouncing my last name.
I’ve given up trying to tell people what my last name is. It’s Thai so it’s long. And my first name is a standard middle name for many American women. HOW HARD IS IT TO SAY MARIE!?! It’s the middle name of what seems like 20% of the females I meet! It’s not Mary. It’s not Maria. It’s not Marcie! MUH-REE. Not hard. Or people would mishear me and think my name is Bree or Brie. Like the cheese. I’m not cheesy. I don’t think.
I seriously hated attendance taking in school.
“Is Mary pause…”
“Yes I’m here. It’s Marie and don’t bother trying my last name.”
snickering from my classmates ensues
Whenever my professors asked me how I knew it was my name they had a problem with, I said it was woman’s intuition. Sigh.
I can’t wait to get married and have another (though noticeably less) odd last name to contend with. The SO says that people get it wrong all the time. Fig-grrr-row-ah. C’mon say it with me! At least I’ll get to correct a new and shorter last name!
I know an “A”. She’s…interesting.
So in other words, that’s a no vote, right?