People Are Stupid

My nickname is Sam. Which would normally mean that my given name is Samantha. Nope. Not even close. In high school I had a second year algebra teacher that couldn't pronounce my real name. He slaughtered it every time. Since I was such a sweet girl at some point I started to ignore him when he called my name. Or I corrected him. He got really tired of it. He finally gave up and started to call me "Sam". I liked it. He never fucked it up. He always pronounced it correctly. And so it stuck.

People have always fucked up my name. My first grade teacher mispronounced my name all year long. I hated that bitch. She was old and I wanted her to die. When I went back to college in '99 I was older, wiser, and still intolerant of people fucking up my name. I was blessed with many foreign professors that could not pronounce my name. It seems to confound people of every nation. It's great. Thanks Mom! So, I told my professors to write "Sam" beside my real name. And they called me Sam. It was heavenly.

When I go to restaurants that ask for your name, I tell them "Sam". I have a couple of clients that fucked up my name enough that I requested they call me "Sam". My friends call me by my given name. Both my former mothers-in-law fucked up my name. Always. I think that was on purpose.

What is there to learn from this? First, I answer to "Sam". If you saw me on the street and called "Sam" I would turn and look around. Second, I named my kid something that no one (at least in this country) will ever fuck up. It starts with an M. You figure it out. I bet he will name his kid something horrific that everyone fucks up. And so it goes.

**For those of you that have too much time on your hands, in the 1970's there were 8,251 girls born with my name. And in 1996 my son's name was one of the top two most popular boy names. For more information on names and shit, go here.