Friday, June 03, 2005

Agitating the Senior Associate

Ever notice how agitated some people get when you screw up little personal things, like their name? In this female-dominated age, errors are easily compounded, because nobody's really sure whether or how to hypenate, concatenate, order, serialize, or drop a second last name. Because many mispell my last name, I can relate. Usually I resort to something the nameholder wrote:

DA, in reply to my email attaching a letter: FYI: my name is [insert name including no hyphens, both last names, in the proper order here], ESQ. NOT [as I copied in the CC: line from an earlier letter, where I got the name from the firm phonebook]
G-man: Sorry, I know you are sensitive about that & I remember you yelling the last time I screwed that up. Let me send out another copy of the letter.
DA: whatever. Geek. don't you have to pack [to go somewhere] or something?
G-man, sensing gel oozing from DA's ruptured
squishy ball:
Whenever I read "geek," I hear you say it with admiration, right?
DA: lol. You know it baby.
G-man, now relieved: The worst part is, my secretary printed out a copy of that letter, but the stupid DM system never updates the DocID in the footer unless it's manually changed. So he really printed the original letter that I cloned it from. They should fix that and make it automatic. Fortunately, the letter didn't go out, because he couldn't pronounce "[insert recipient's name here]," which is how I discovered the mistake to begin with.
DA: I know, that is the dumbest thing. Maybe you should call the helpless desk. While your at it, you should take your wife's last name.
G-man: Yeah. Her cousin Bluto did that.