Thank you, Mrs. Aka

I have a bad name. No, it's not what people call me, thank heavens. When I was born my parents decided to name me after both grandmothers (hyphenated, thank you very much. And NO one recognizes what a hyphen is, and drop the second part of my name) and a family friend 25 to 50-plus years my senior. I love my grandmothers, but not their names. Especially smacked together. Thankfully, my parents tossed in Elizabeth, so I had something to choose from, and I didn't have to scrap the whole thing. I'm told I lucked out, as they considered "Bertha-Nell". What can I say? I blame the 70's. This is one of the reasons people put their parents in old-age homes that appear on 60 Minutes.



Because cyberspace has inherent dangers, I will not be posting the actual name. The privileged ones of you that read this that know what it is know what I mean. And they'll keep it to themselves to protect my identity, privacy, and most importantly, our friendship.



As you can imagine, when your legal name doesn't match the name you answer to, simple business transactions can be made more difficult. For example, when you're on the phone with your bank and they ask for your name, someone that answers to "Beth" all the time stammers and sputters a bit before giving the legal moniker bestowed upon her when she was too young to make an argument against it. After this happened 6 or 7 hundred times, I finally had the bank add AKA Beth to my account.



Now to the reason I'm telling you this: it has everything to do with the name of this site, and the name of this blog. Allow me to explain.



The aforementioned bank, in its infinite wisdom, added this AKA Beth to the main name line provided in their system. So the next time a debit card was issued to me, the name line read XXXXX-XXXX E AKA BETH WO (where the X's are my legal name). XXXXX-XXXX E AKA BETH WO. My last name is five letters, and it didn't fit on the card. You can imagine the confusion this caused at the various points of sale.



Many of you are familiar with Safeway's policy of thanking their customers by name, based on their payment method. Now picture, if you will, trying to pick out a last name from this card.



While I feel her pain, I still left the store holding my sides from raucous laughter having just received my one-and-only: "Thank you, Mrs. Aka."