Monday, March 13, 2006

What's in a name?

I had a weekend break from the blog...not entirely intentionally. Yesterday, I went online to try to read posts and write my own, but my browser would freeze everytime I would try to go more than one link away from my homepage. I'm not sure if it was on strike or what the problem is. I just hope it's gone when I get home.

So the weekend. I spent Saturday, blissfully, at home. I went out only to do some grocery shopping and take a short walk with B.

Sunday, I got up early and headed to the lovely rally, I've been kvetching about. It was, frankly, a waste of time. The orientation videos that they played for us, we'd already seen in our clinic. They played loud dance and high energy music and get people cheering and clapping. We even had a competition for which clinic could come up with the best cheer. It's supposed to be all about building team spirit in our clinics, but I think there are better ways to do it.

But then the whole thing didn't start out on the best note for me. I went to sign in and found that they had misspelled my first name. I'm used to a certain amount of this with both my first and last name. The last is easy to say but does not have the conventional spelling. The first is, apparently, difficult to get right...both in spelling and pronunciation. But yesterday, with the substitution of one letter, they had transformed my name into another name altogether...a man's name.

"Um, you got my name wrong," I told the person in blue (designating he's the one to help sort these things out). "Oh, sorry!" he replied. "This is a man's name," I pointed out helpfully. "Uh, yeah. Sorry!" Clearly I was not going to get a new name tag or any help with correcting this. "Well, I'll just correct it on the sign-in sheet, then," I say and proceeded to do so.

So I decided to be good-natured about it and joke to everyone that I'd become a man for the day. But it began to rub me a little wrong when they launched into their spiel about the importance of the company name...yadda yadda yadda. At the end of the day, they handed out certificates showing that we had completed the training progam (i.e. watching the videos we'd already watched). I went to collect mine and found that my correction of the sign-in sheet was clearly not registered because once again my first name was replaced by this other...by that time, I just wanted to go home.

I brought all the documentation home to show B, and she just about fell to the floor in laughter.

In other fronts...my chiropractic appointment went well on Friday. Just that one session really helped relieve a lot of pain I've been having. I also had a really interesting therapy session (my own) on Friday. We talked about the symbolism of my play as a child. It was not only eye opening, but it was fascinating as someone who is just interested in psychology. So cool.

Oh, yeah! And there's only 19 days left!

3 comments:

Aravis said...

How annoying that rally sounds! At least B got a good laugh out of it. *G* Glad the visit to the chiropractor helped!

Anonymous said...

The rally sounds like it depleted your morale rather than boosted it, plus anytime there is a "mandatory" thing on a SUNDAY it sends just a little bit of a mixed message! oy :) happy to hear the chiropractor helped tho'

Matt said...

Well...it could have been worse. They could have had you sing campfire songs. In some respect I'm sure it did gel your group as a team. I mean, I'm sure you all hated it didn't you?