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Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

If you build a better mousetrap, the world will build a better mouse.

What I mean is, my family name is "Strickler." It's easy - pronounced exactly as it is spelled. Yet I get called "strick," "sticker," "strickland," "striker," "stickler," etc. My wife didn't take my name when we got married, with one of the major reasons being "nobody can pronounce your name right." Yes, I've slightly switch topics here to family names over first names, but the issue is the same - doesn't matter if it's pronounced exactly as spelled, doesn't matter if it is a common name or uses standard characters - the problem is that people don't read or pay attention. You could be "Smith" or "Johnson" and somebody would screw it up, so you (or your parents) might as well pick something you like.

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My name is easy beyond belief but people get it wrong ALL THE TIME. You'd think "Jane" is pretty safe, but especially at Starbucks it gets rewritten into a lot of other names like "Shane" or "Jayne" or "Jain". My now maiden name "Lee" is...well...."Li", "Le", "Leigh"..........I think one person almost got my new last name wrong but it was over the phone and a B vs V problem.

Even better is when I was at Disney World for part of my honeymoon. If you tell Disney employees you're celebrating an occasion, they'll give you a button for it - e.g. honeymoon, 1st visit, family reunion. One employee offered to customize my husband's and my very boring honeymoon buttons for us with our names. She asked my husband if he spelled his name (Kevin) "the way you expect to spell it". I got a button that said "with Keven" and didn't have the heart to tell her what was wrong with it.

BTW at my restaurant I used to use names and now I just use numbers. Numbers are way easier to remember and call out, and makes it harder for people to accidentally (or purposefully) take the wrong thing if they can't return the number card back.

>She asked my husband if he spelled his name (Kevin) "the way you expect to spell it". I got a button that said "with Keven" and didn't have the heart to tell her what was wrong with it.

Poor girl. As someone cursed with the inability to spell non-phonetically I'd hate to have to ever write anything without the help of spell check.

It's such a silly thing when you think about it but people will write you off as a moron without a second thought.

My favorite are the typographical issues. My last name contains an I and I often hear L in its place from telemarketers. Makes hanging up on them even easier than it already is.

Happens with first names, too. My wife's name is "Erin"-with-an-E, and she always gets asked "is that with an A or an E?" Really? How many girls are there named "Aaron"-with-an-A? Oddly, nobody ever seems to worry about the genuine multiple possible spellings of Erin/Eirinn/Eireann.

Nobody ever has problems with "Logan", though. I suspect it's just common enough that most people are familiar with the spelling and the pronunciation (thank-you X-Men), but sufficiently uncommon that almost nobody has ever encountered a weird alternate spelling that could cause confusion.

Gonna encourage one of the kids to name their firstborn L'eaughanne!

(Don't worry--they don't do any of the things I tell 'em to do, no matter much amusement it would give me.)

I had an uncommon last name, but changed it to Johnson when I got married. I have yet to have someone mispronounce or misspell it, and I still appreciate that just a little bit every time I give my name over the phone.

But we gave our children very uncommon first names so their whole names would be unique.

This is true. My last name is Thomas but people will sometimes refer to me as Thompson, Thomason, etc. I get a lot of people asking how it's spelled,too (even native English speakers).

My name is an uncommon one: "Leland Batey". However, pretty much everyone pronounces it correctly.

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