What's In A Name?

You know how at your first day of work they're supposed to treat you right? Show you to your office, explain the benefits, and just do the whole "roll out the red carpet" thing? Well, that wasn't quite what I experienced recently.

They did everything right, except for spelling my last name. In fact, they weren't even close. They dropped three consonants and added a vowel. After they were done mangling it, it beared very little resemblance to my name.

But that's no problem, right? I'm sure they'd be glad to correct it when I brought the mistake to their attention. I just knew I had to tell everyone as soon as possible, before it got copied to too many places.

They fixed it in my HR file, in the employee database, in the email system, and on the network. They even printed up new stickers for my folders. Everything was looking good, until it came to my computer.

Apparently, it's not easy to change the name of a computer. The change would work in most places, but one of the applications we use doesn't like it when the computer's name changes. So, rather than reinstalling that one application, the system administrator decided that I could live with the misspelling.

So here's the situation now. Every time I turn on my computer, the login screen shows the wrong name. Every time I lock my computer, it shows the wrong name. One of the applications I use every day has a title bar showing the wrong name. Anytime someone needs to access my computer on the network, I have to tell them to look for the wrong name. They decided that instead of fixing the name and reinstalling one application, that it would be better to annoy me to death every day for the next five years. Yeah, that makes sense.

But hey, what's in a name? He who we call me by any other name would still be me, or something like that. But you know what? I think it's important to spell someone's name correctly. Call me crazy, but don't you like it when people call you by your own name and not something that may or may not be a name at all? It just seems that it's worth spending two seconds to double-check someone's name before you irreversibly butcher it.

If you want people to like you, get their name right. By the way, our system administrator is named Greg. Tomorrow I think I'll find out if he likes Craig better.