adz:

heeheehee so pure.

i also love how this kind of post gets us all sharing our own stories

…I have a lot of weird interactions with strangers, but most are at least somewhat understandable if you spend a little while thinking about it from the perspectives involved

But. One of the ones that took me a very long time to figure out, was when some guy at a bus stop asked me my name, and I answered with my real first name without thinking– and he immediately started calling me “Brenda.”

my real name is not Brenda. It does not even resemble Brenda. it has a different number of syllables and mostly different letters.

so, I initially assumed he was doing the thing that characters do in sitcoms as shorthand to show that they’re obnoxious and unlikable and not respectful of the protagonist (deliberately calling them by a different name, when they very clearly know the real name, just to demonstrate how much that doesn’t matter to them)

and it really weirded me out. Because 1. i had never seen a real person doing that, and 2. going by how the conversation progressed, he was definitely hitting on me, and I can’t imagine how he might have thought that would help his case.

But then, he didn’t notice my wedding ring either (this was back when I was definitely not single) so I guess maybe he was just clueless overall?

But then.

a few months later, I was in a doctor’s waiting room

and I was very sure I heard my name called, so I got up– but then the nurse repeated the name, and… it was Brenda.

I had misheard Brenda as my own name.

So. Apparently, it is possible that– in certain voices, with certain kinds of ambient background noise– my legal name and Brenda may have some sort of “Yanni and Laurel” thing going on.

Who knew.

the weird things you learn from going out and interacting with the world, sometimes.