I’ve had basic entry level retail and serving / restaurant jobs since I was 14.
I also have a decently unique name. Meaning quite a lot of people have the same name as me but we all spell it differently.
Every… and I do mean every, single job I’ve had up until this point has always spelled my name wrong constantly.
Wether it’s on my name tag, forcing me to wait an extra week or two to get a new one printed with my name spelled right. (One time I started a job with my name tag spelled wrong, sent it back and got the second and it was still spelled wrong. I didn’t get a name tag that was correct for a whole month or so. All the while management would forget my tags were misspelled and try to give me warnings about not wearing my name tag)
Or it’s on the printed schedules in the back, once my name was misspelled every week the schedule was posted and I would have to fix the spelling issue with a pen. And every one of our managers spelled my name differently, all without checking how it was spelled, and without ever changing it or correcting it when I told them.
And another time I had to shorten my name because no one at the place I was working would pronounce my name right even when I told them how to multiple times, and no manager spelled it right on anything. I’ve literally had my w-2’s with a misspelled name.
So I’ve had to shorten my name to 3 letters to get some people to spell it correctly or say it right.
I thought all that was normal, or okay because of how my name it spelled differently.
But I recently started a better job. I say better but I mean a more professional/ important job at a bigger company that people hardly ever leave.
And i have never once had to tell anyone there how to spell or pronounce my name. They all already knew how. No one has wrote the wrong name on the schedules, or any important paperwork, or my name tag, or on literally anything. My name is always spelled correctly, said properly, and I’ve never been asked how to spell it or say it, except for by people outside my department.
I realized today why that was, apparently on the day that new people start the managers gather our department and tell us about the new person. Including their name and the spelling. So when they come in we can all say “welcome ‘xyz’”.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt so respected by that simple action of spelling my name correctly. I mean my own family misspells my name all the time so they all call me by that 3 letter nickname so they’ll say it and spell it right. And i keep thinking about all the jobs that I really liked but hated the management. And if I would have stayed there if the managers showed me this little bit of basic respect like knowing their employees names.
Just something I thought I’d share. Sometimes it feels good to be minor respected by our corporate overlords.