The Curse of the "M" Name

Hubby and I used to joke when we first started dating about my name. It's a pretty simplistic name though multi-syllable, yet people have trouble with it. We met in a Research Methods class in graduate school, where we survived a passive aggressive professor. The short version of the story is she didn't like me and what I represented, so I was forced to re-take her class. Good news was I met hubby. But back to the story ... this professor would look at my paper, see my name, and call out for Michelle. Without fail, it happened every time. Then while answering phones at work, customers always thought I said Martha when I gave my name. I'd shrug it off and move on.

A decade later, I have a current customer who likes to "flirt" with me regularly, but every time we'd chat, he'd call me by a different "M" name. I finally told him just to call me "M." He recently brought me a book he'd published in which he wrote an inscription for "M." So this week, I met Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings blog fame. In the course of our conversation, he asked my name twice and repeated it. So imagine my shock when reading his article about his visit to the center in which I'm named Michelle. You can read his article, "Day 7 on the Seaver Midwest Genealogy Tour" posted on September 12.

As you can see I try to be good humored about it, but if you have real trouble with my name, you can always call me Mel. Do you have this issue with your name?