What's my name?

For the first time in 8 years, I find myself living outside of a college town. Since I have no college gym to go exercise at, I figured I might as well look into joining a gym. As a sidenote, I must say that when the dude at the gym was giving me a tour of the place, I felt like some chump ass yuppie -- perhaps a topic for another post.

Anywhoo, this dude is showing me around the gym and he keeps mispronouncing my name. No big deal, though, as my name isn't exactly one you hear everyday and people have been saying it wrong ever since I was a wee lad. After getting my name wrong for the billionth time, the dude says to me "Hey, I'm really sorry about getting your name wrong. I'm really bad with names and I feel awful because I always hate when people mispronounce my name." I looked at his name tag expecting to see something weird like "Zimbabwe" or "Shii`ncey~goo". But no - his name was as simple as they come. His nametag read "Jeff". Hmm... how the hell would anyone ever pronounce that name wrong?!

That reminds me: In high school, I always used to dread the first day of class when they took attendance for the first time as the teachers would inevitably mess up my name. The class would then laugh and throw darts at me.