What scares me most is that people assuming you spell your name wrong means that there <i>are</i> people who regularly mispell their own name!
I get this a lot, both my first name, Lee, and my last name as well. People correct me and tell me that I mean Lisa or Lynne, not Lee. I have taken to saying Lee, as in Spike Lee, or General Robert E. Lee.
On one occasion in chat I said that I was in Des Plaines, IL and one idiot corrected me and said you mean, Des Moines, IA. Idiots abound.
As much as I would love to rant about people spelling my name wrong on their faxes to me, that is usually the least of the problems I have to deal with daily. (And don’t get me wrong; about 50% of the people who have seen my name on a fax or email I sent them still get it wrong.)
“Well, we ordered the same thing last year. No, I don’t remember the price, date, purchase order number, or part number. But we got them from you.”
“Yes, I know that’s the price you quoted, but I misbid to my customer, got the job, and anow I’m going to lose $3000 if you don’t adjust your price for me.”
“Well of course you have to offer the same price to everyone. But can’t you give me a better deal? Or maybe offer it only to me?”
I hate people. I wish the only thing they did was spell my name wrong.
I can deal with simple misspellings of a common name that’s often spelled in different ways. My wife’s first name could start with either of two letters, and could end in either “ie” or “y”.
It’s the last name that drives me nuts. I pronounce it carefully, I spell it out, and still people insist on adding letters to it. It’s only six letters long. It’s common in Scotland, uncommon over here in the States, but similar to a whole bunch of other longer names.
I’m with you, cowgirl; the worst is in email. I can’t believe when my name is spelled correctly both in the header and the .sig of my email, and people respond with a misspelling.
As much as I would love to rant about people spelling my name wrong on their faxes to me, that is usually the least of the problems I have to deal with daily. (And don’t get me wrong; about 50% of the people who have seen my name on a fax or email I sent them still get it wrong.)
“Well, we ordered the same thing last year. No, I don’t remember the price, date, purchase order number, or part number. But we got them from you.”
“Yes, I know that’s the price you quoted, but I misbid to my customer, got the job, and now I’m going to lose $3000 if you don’t adjust your price for me.”
“Well of course you have to offer the same price to everyone. But can’t you give me a better deal? Or maybe offer it only to me?”
I hate people. I wish the only thing they did was spell my name wrong.
And then there are the people that send things twice!!!
D’oh!
My glucometer died on Thursday night, so I had to call the company for a replacement meter (which they provided for free – if Lifescan were a man, I’d have his babies).
My first name is Sarah, and it’s commonly misspelled as Sara. I’m not a Sara; I’m a Sarah. Whenever I have to give anyone my name, I always say “Sarah with an ‘h’.” When I gave the person at Lifescan my name, they asked me if I meant, “S-a-h-r-a.”
What the hell? Who spells Sarah with an ‘h’ in the middle of it?
And don’t get me started on my last name. Six letters long, but a vast majority of the population is unable to pronounce it. And it’s even an English surname, so I can’t pull the foreign language card.
sigh I’d change my name to Jane Smith, but than somebody would ask if I meant Jayne Smythe.
Oh, I know I’ve told this one before…
My daughter’s name is also Sarah-with-an-h , and once I said that to someone (some civil servant I had to give her name to), and she responded with, “Wouldn’t that be ‘Shara’?”
:smack:
I work at a retail store where, every day, there is a list of who is working and what department they are working in, usually by made up by the HR manager.
I’ve been at my job for a year and three months and my name (extremely common, but has two common variations) is spelled wrong on this paper on a regular basis.
I feel bad for my coworker, Matt – every so often, he becomes “Mat.” This is handwritten, by the way, so I can’t even blame it on speedy typing.
Heh. Mat.
Hmmm
O’Hara / Ohara?
:eek: :eek:
That’s funny, I’ve got a standard spelling, yet people still get it wrong all the time. Maybe it’s that their assumption of ‘standard’ spelling is actually just one of several standard spellings. It’s not their fault they don’t even think that the name might have different spellings in different ethnic background.
I had this happen to me just this past week. I went on my company’s web site to update my annual appraisal goals. I had just completed some training and wanted to get credit for it while I could remember the documentation. So I forgot my password; so sue me. I clicked on the little “forgot password I’m a dumbass” button and found out they have my e-mail address listed as basically: Dogzillah at blah de blah. Wrong e-mail address and they’d changed the last letter of my first name which is common enough to be just like being named Jane Smith. Or Jayne Smythe, as the case may be. So I have to fire off another e-mail to find out a) what’s my password and b) are there two of us with very similar names or is my name misspelled. We’re talking about a company of probably 3,000 employees just in my division. There’s at least two other people with my name just in my town; everywhere I have ever lived there’s been at least two other people with my name. It is highly likely that there are two Jayne Smythes working for my company, with one little letter difference in spelling.
They won’t tell me.
They just keep on sending my password to this bogus e-mail address and I keep sending e-mails off to HR bigwigs in Texas, none of whom I’ve ever met.
– Dogzilla Doe
Something I have often considered, but not actually put into practice yet, is refusing to respond to “Loretta” or “Laredo”, then if I get bitched out for it, say, "Well, how was I supposed to know you were talking to me, my name isn’t “Loretta/Laredo”. Alternately, e-mail could be replied to with a note, “You seem to have sent this to the wrong person, please check the addy, Sincerely, Loretto.”
One of these days, I’m going to actually try this.
I have an unusual first name. Unfortunately, it’s not an unusual word, so people already think they know how to spell it; and who am I to argue when someone wants to spell it with a y rather than an i on the end? After all, that’s the way it’s spelled in the dictionary.
Mr.stretch has a similiar problem; his name is common, but usually spelled with an i rather than a y. So, when explaining how to spell our names is just tell folks it’s my name with a i and his name with a y–just the opposite of what you’d expect. This helps a little.
Because my name is different, I pretty much answer to anything close to it. People can’t get a handle on my name; I think in their minds they think “I must have heard her wrong”, so they guess at a name that sounds similiar that they’ve heard before. At one job the deputy director called me by the wrong name the entire time we both worked there; don’t know if anybody else ever knew who he was talking about.
I’m grateful for my wonderfully common last name. At least folks know how it’s spelled (though sometimes they ask just to be sure).
I suspect that InvisibleWombat’s wife and I have the same first name. My first, middle, and last names are all very easy and standard, yet people are always trying to spell it creatively. Oi. Making assumptions about names aren’t good either. When I took my very nervous, very Jewish stepbrother to get his driver’s license, the nice TEXDOT lady was trying to make conversation, and complimented him on his very Baptist first and middle names, and then asked if he did missionary work. Since he was nervous he didn’t throw his usual fit. Another friend of mine is Mexican. For some reason, many people think he’s Italian. On more than on occasion people have argued with him about how to spell his name, and what his ethnic background is, as if he wouldn’t know.
On the other hand, I did catch a friend of mine spelling his name wrong on his yahoo account he used for business, so it does happen. Oh, the teasing that ensued.
My name isn’t Kayla.
That’s all.
Laci?
My last name has five letters, ending with L-Y. So I say it and immediately spell it. Not hard, right, five letters? Not a chance. It’s promptly repeated back to me with an L-E-Y. Sigh.
Of course, my maiden name was White, and you wouldn’t believe how often that was misspelled/changed to another color. My favorite was the time I got called my sister’s first name + Green.
I am 44 years old. I have familiy members and former colleagues who have had between 20 and 44 years to learn the proper spelling of my name (Tracey) and yet cannot bring themselves to actually retain this information in my brain. Invitations, birthday cards, thank you cards (which are all sent in response to a gift I’ve sent with my name on the card), they’re all a crap shoot when it comes to getting something addressed to me as Tracey.
I also get e-mails with my name misspelled, Tracy, Traci, Tracie, Tracee, anything but what’s right, and frequently not even the same misspelling from the same people from e-mail to e-mail. But the kicker is that my primary e-mail address is tracey@myfamilydomain.com. And more often than not, they get it right (I’m presuming only because they clicked “add to address book” at some point when I’ve e-mailed them) but when they don’t, it comes to me anyway because I administer the domain and therefore get the “catchall” e-mails.
In a fit of pique, I set up rules which bounce back any e-mail addressed to tracy@ traci@ tracie@ tracee@ or trace@ just because I could.
Then I get a phone call. “Your e-mail isn’t working.” :mad:
To me it’s a matter of consideration. When I know that I’m going to be communicating with people in writing, I learn how to spell their names. I learn to spell their nicknames if they go by them. If I’m unsure of the spelling, I ask them, and I’ve found that people appreciate that I want to address them properly. I can’t imagine going through life being lackadaisical about other people’s names that way. It’s just simple, basic common sense and everyday etiquette to me.
We hired a new girl this week. Her name is Katlin. I hadn’t met her yet, or heard her name pronounced, so when I had to call her at home, and got her mother, I pronounced the name the way it is spelled…Cat Lynn. The mom gave a very exasperated sigh and said very clearly and distinctly so I wouldn’t be confused that “Kate Lynn” was at school and would call back later. It was all I could do to restrain myself and ask why she had chosen that spelling when she had to have known that people would mispronounce it for ever! I am enough of a brat to continue to mispronounce it in the forseeable future and even ask this girl “How am I supposed to know that Kat is pronounced Kate”.
My first name has two common spellings (ends in y or ie) and three less common spellings that involve i, and the removal of one of the doubled letters in the middle. Fortunately no one can mispronounce it, and I’ve gotten very good at changing ie into a y on most handwritten documents.