Thursday, July 20, 2006

What's in a Name?

Dashing to a meeting, I ran into an exec from my new department. I'm awful with names, as an earlier post illustrates. I sat there for an interminable snapshot in time wracking my brain. The funny thing is, I could totally see her email alias floating in my head. I just couldn't remember how to pronounce her name. Her name is spelled "Jere" but I couldn't for the dwindling life of me remember if it's pronounced "Jerry" like Seinfeld or "Jeer" as in what I get for not remembering. So I compromise -- "Good morning Jeeeery."

As polished as she is, there was only the briefest flicker of front-desk-get-me-security before she returned the greeting with perfect pronounciation on my somehwhat harder to remember name...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

She was also doing the same. "Is it hide-e-o, hi-de-o, hide-o... dang! Just smile." And we all struggle with those old favorites, Shashikant and Zdravko. Why couldn't we have just stuck with the simple names, you know... Wlodzimierz.

Marika said...

We had a new dude at work a few months ago and all the announcements said to welcome Jon to the company. Jon...how difficult is it to get that wrong? I met him in the tea room, barrelled up and did my self-introduction thing and he's smiled and kindly corrected me - "It's pronounced 'Juan'".

 

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