I know it can be annoying to be called by the wrong name or receive emails with the wrong name. I would talk to the person and ask that he try to remember how to spell your name. If that doesn’t work, you could do as others have suggested and misspell his name in an email.
I had a coworker who would always shorten my name and send me emails that started:
C,
Here’s the documents you asked for.
M.
I sent her a return email stating I would prefer emails with my name as “C” is not my name. She continued with “C”. I sent her one more email stating the next email I received from her that just had “C,” I would delete and that if she wanted me to do something for her she needed to direct her emails to me with my first name- or if she preferred- Mrs. Chuckledoodle. She got the hint and now starts every email with Chuckledoodle. yes it was drastic, but laziness drives me crazy. Plus we were not on friendly enough terms for her to shorten me to one letter.
Never bothered me, my last name is tough to spell, and to be honest I have family members who can’t spell it all the time, either lol. If it is important, like a legal document, then I am picky about it, but if it is a memo or something, I would be perfectly okay if it is misspelled or they abbreviate it, growing up kids did that all the time, I kind of got used to it.
@nottelling , IIRC you are an attorney. Regardless of the size of your firm, if the context of the misspelling is professional, then I consider it inappropriate and quite rude, especially as you’ve already addressed it.
If this individual is a colleague as opposed to a supervisor who has some power over your work situation, I would send him / her a one-line written memo reading, in essence:
As you are new to the office and may have overlooked its proper spelling, please spell my name correctly in the future as:
My very best friend…who I have know since I was eleven years old…is an awful speller, and that includes my last name. She has consistently spelled it wrong…and not even the same wrong way…for 34 years. It’s actually a bit endearing. We don’t even need to look at a return address when the mail comes from her. We know who it is from.
I would add to his e-mail, PS: That’s Bookworm, not Backwards."
I’d send this PS every time my name was misspelled, to all the recipients. You cannot change this colleague, but you don’t have to passively accept his error.
My first name goes against a common spelling rule, and my last name is common, but spelled in an unusual way. Both have been misspelled for much of my life, though the more erudite friends in my current home city usually spell things correctly. At work, in writing, I usually correct it, so as to not reinforce the wrong spelling for co workers, but we laugh about the confusion sometimes associated with having many co workers with similar names. As with most things of this nature, making a lighthearted comment about it can bring attention without causing offense.
No interest in being offended, there are bigger fish to fry in the world! There are many varieties of learning disabilities or reasons for lack of attention to detail, and it easier to give them a pass than be offended.
I have that problem with people when it comes to my first and last name lol
For my first name, people tend to add an extra letter to the end. Normally, I didn’t care, but one of my friends had my name with an extra letter at the end, and it would get irritating to think someone was calling out to me when I was with him. Even now, it’s a habit to clarify that my name doesn’t have anything else at the end.
My last name is even worse, because almost every single person I’ve told it to gets it wrong. It’s not a difficult last name, but phonetically it sounds different than how it’s spelled. Whenever someone asks my last name, I automatically just say, “*******. It’s ,,,,,,, and *. That’s how it’s spelled”.
I don’t get it, @AttorneyMother. Why would you give people the correct spelling and then sign the note with the wrong spelling. Is this for some legal reason?
My first name can be a man’s or a woman’s depending on the spelling (I’m a woman). It is spelled correctly in my (work) e-mail address, and it is spelled correctly in my e-mail signature. I still get responses to my e-mails with “Hi [wrong one]”.
I refuse to donate to the grad school I attended because they sent the solicitation to the wrong spelling, along with “Mr.”
Worst, though, was when I got a notice to register for the draft!
If the misspelling is appearing on anything approaching a professional document or in a professional context, I would insist that the spelling be corrected - as Attorneymother suggests. I obviously don’t know how difficult the co-worker is, but I would be tempted to matter-of-factly bring it to his attention each time I see it wrong. It is his mistake to correct - not yours to put up with.
My maiden name was a common one - with an uncommon spelling. Each year, my mother fought the battle with the school as there was always some form where it was misspelled. I can hear her today, “These are official documents. The name must be spelled correctly.”
The really ironic thing was that my father’s name had been misspelled on his birth certificate. His parents weren’t as sophisticated as my mom apparently - they just changed it themselves on the copy they held. It created quite a problem down the road when he needed a passport.
My name a four letter extremely common name and somehow it still manages to get butchered by people I work with. I just let it go. For me, it’s not worth arguing.
If it was on something official or going out to another individual then I’d bring it up. For internal communications- eh, whatever.
Both my husband and I have names that are almost constantly misspelled. There is a name that is close to mine that is more common , both in spelling and pronunciation. I have lived with that annoyance for my entire life ( not to mention the lack of keychains and other souvenirs with my name )
On the other hand, my husband has a common name with a Scandinavian spelling so it is even more rare to get anyone to grasp the spelling of his name. What really irritates is the way people automatically default to the shortened version of his name, despite being told what he " goes by " ( think calling someone Rick when they go by Richard , although that isn’t his name )e despises the shortened version of his first name
I assume this coworker is also an attorney, so I would hold him/her to a higher standard. Attorneys have to be especially careful when it comes to such stuff, because unfortunately, you can’t laugh off an error that ends up on a legal document.
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The really ironic thing was that my father’s name had been misspelled on his birth certificate. His parents weren’t as sophisticated as my mom apparently - they just changed it themselves on the copy they held. It created quite a problem down the road when he needed a passport.
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I don’t know what the correct spelling of my H’s name is. Seriously. He has a common first name that has two ways to spell it (think Steven and Stephen). I’ve never gotten the straight story as to what the real spelling is. His mom put one thing on birth cert, but I think she got home from the hospital and decided that she wanted to spell it another way …I’m really not sure and neither is H. H’s mom was never clear on that. His baptismal cert has a different spelling than his birth cert. I think that added to the problem since many places would take a baptismal cert in lieu of a birth cert for ID. Oh, and his birth cert has an extra “h” at the end of his middle name. what the heck? Everyone was asleep at the wheel, I guess.
So for years, H spelled his name one way. Then at some point in time, his employer balked because of something (I think something showed up during a security clearance,) and then suddenly H’s name badge had to change and at work he had to spell his name the “other way”. But, everything else, credit cards, etc, still has the spelling that I use for him. His passport has the birth cert spelling.
My father joked about hating his middle name most of his adult life. He was named after a historical figure, so the meaning was important, but it still sounded like a girl’s name to him. His brother got an even worse middle name, again named after a historical figure, so my dad felt at least his name wasn’t as bad as his brother’s middle name.
Fast forward decades, Dad’s son is named Jr., and Dad passes on the not so great middle name. And when my dad passed away and we rounded up all the official papers, lo and behold the birth certificate surfaces for the first time ever. Dad was not given a middle name officially on his birth certificate. He had spent his whole life joking about a middle name that he didn’t legally possess!
That was the first good laugh I had in those first few weeks after my dad died.
My D has an easy sounding, easy to spell first name. Second child, we chose a risky name that we thought had two ways to spell it. We have since learned that, not only are there about 5 ways to spell this name, but my son shared the same name (and same spelling) as a girl in my D’s scout troop. I spent 8 years saying "I have to go pick up MY “insert name here” to avoid confusion.
That IS funny @powercropper! Names are a strange thing–we are relieved that both kids seem to like theirs and D has thanked us for giving us her name. She has even grown to like her ethnic middle name, as has S. The middle initials help reduce confusion, as S has a common first name and even the last name is fairly common.
I have started telling my kids stories about the names I had picked out for my future children at age 12, when it seems that picking names is so vitally important to young girls. They are very thankful I didn’t give birth til I was mature enough to pick decent names!
