Twenty: Reading and Repeating

Moving on… (I've actually never had so many comments or so much traffic as for that last post).

The comments to my last post served up a dose of that thing which annoys the hell out of me: getting my name wrong.

It's written right in front of you, so how did you collapse my first and last names into one, which is wrong? This is not, as you might imagine, the first time that this has happened to me. I've had it verbally in meetings, I've had it in the quick response writing that would be Facebook posts or blog comments, but I have also had it in an official response letter from a government official to whom I had written a complaint.

How little attention must one offer to detail to get wrong the name of the person who wrote a complaint while responding to that complaint in writing on paper? And in a context where these things usually go through a few re-reads before they get sent off, that means a number of people got it wrong. It's really a basic lack of respect with a dash of laziness mixed in.

I have responded to this in the past by politely correcting (doesn't have lasting effect) and then by ridiculously reproducing the mistake in my response, applying it to the name of the offending individual (better results). For the purpose of this blog (Whose space? My space!) I believe I will respond by not publishing any comment getting my name wrong. Comments not being a big thing for my posts, there won't be widespread anguish, but I will get a certain degree of satisfaction from that.

And I'm mostly here to satisfy my own need to express myself, hoping that someone is interested in listening, but not controlled by that.

Sign me…Ken Monteith (or else!).