This was just to much. My name is Stephen it’s pronounced Steffin. At wok I go by Steve, as we have a Stephanie in my department, it cuts doen on confusion.
I call up a service center to ask for a quote. "We send quotations by fax sir, may I have your name & fax number. Sure it’s Stephen, that’s with a “ph”, 510-555-1234. "Thank you sir, you should receive a fax in a few moments.
Ten minutes later I receive a fax. Attn: Stevenph.
My first name is Mac. I am a single male. Last week, I got a piece of junk mail addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Mac Mac.
Also, my HMO refuses to acknowledge my gender. Every letter they send me is adressed Ms. This is a disturbing trait in the people who are supposedly responsible for my helath care. “No, we will not cover your prostate surgery. You’re a woman, you don’t have a prostate.”
I’ve mentioned this one before (as have others with the same name):
My daughter’s name is Sarah. With an “H.” At the end.
If she says, “Sarah, with an H” she invariably gets “Shara.”
Idiots.
“Stevenph”…makes me want to say your name with a wet raspberry at the end!
I have the same name as my father, which is to say that he is MysterEcks and I am really MysterEcks, Jr. (If anybody thought I was really him, I apologize for the deception.) Years ago we had accounts at the same bank. There was never a problem with this until for some reason they managed to get the notion that hewas MysterEcks, Jr. Next thing I know, my statements are coming in listing me as “MysterEcks, Jr., Jr.”
After I moved my bucks to a different bank, they dropped the “Jr.” from my father’s name. I don’t know if that meant I became a complete unperson to them, or what.
This is in fact something of a hijack of this thread, but I just had to share.
This is in fact profoundly disturbing. My father told me this story years ago, about a friend of his. Same name - R. N. becoming Ronly Nonly - and everything. I even considered posting it to the “Is My Name That Hard to Spell?” thread a while back.
Now I’m wondering if my father knows Stoid’s father, and I’m having that hideous, creepy sensation you get when your real life and your net life intersect. You know what I mean. It’s similar to the one you get when you discover your current partner ran into one of your ex-partners at the store. But I’m just going to assume that there was a human interest story written about Stoid’s father in a newspaper somewhere, and my father read it and then somehow remembered it as happening to a friend of his.
My dad’s first name was Leslie. (As in Leslie Nielson, etc.) It didn’t help that a handsome actor (for his age) like Nielson shared my dad’s first name. My dad HATED that name. Especially when mail would come to “Miss” or Mrs." Leslie. He was mortified. He tried to go by his middle name as much as possible, or just his initials.
Now I have the opposite problem. I go by my initials (I like my given name, but people are prone to use its nickname no matter how much I ask them not to - so I stick to initials.) Well, I get a lot of mail to “Mr.” Yosemitebabe. It’s irritating.
Also, stuffinb - I am reminded of a local TV ad in the L.A. area where a guy (I think he’s a plumber) keeps on correcting the announcer, who is mispronouncing his last name. The plumber keeps on insisting “Stephen - Jack Stephen!” (And I think it’s spelled the same way, but I’m not 100% sure.)
The way I heard it, back in the late 1940s, a guy with initials for a name joined the Army. His recruiter entered the guy’s name as:
R.(only) B.(only) Jones—you can guess the rest.