5/11/2017

Not-So-Secret Identity

Story Sent in by Thomas:

I met Courtney online and our first date happened after she had been away on a business trip to Florida. We went out to dinner and she handed me a little present wrapped in blue tissue paper. I opened it. It was a little personalized license plate keychain with the name, "Jason."

My name is Thomas.

I thanked her for it but didn't correct her. She referred to me as Jason for the rest of the date and I hadn't the heart to tell her otherwise. When we spoke or emailed over the next week she called me "Jason." By that point it was far too late to back out of the "Jason" thing so I just let it go on.

It wasn't until I brought her to my place and she saw my degree on the wall that she asked, "Is your real name Thomas?"

I told her it was. She asked, "Why did you lie to me about your name?"

I said, "I didn't. In our first emails I always signed my messages 'Thomas.' You were the one who bought me that personalized Jason keychain and have been calling me Jason the past couple of weeks."

She didn't believe me so I pulled up our first emails and indeed I had signed them Thomas. She said she was confused and didn't understand anything anymore and then she left. I decided to wait for her to contact me once she became un-confused. Still waiting.

11 comments:

  1. This is one of those times when everyone is trying to be nice (that is, I don't think OP is a jerk), but that desire to save people's feelings just creates additional tension later on. She was obviously not trying to screw with Tom/Jay, but once the misnaming was done and allowed to fester -- due to mistaken politeness -- there was very little way back to a place of mutuality.

    What I mean to say is that if you let people call you the wrong name for weeks, this is what happens.

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  2. Thomas seems wishy washy.Courtney may have been confused about the name but even more confused that Jason would let this charade go on for as long as it did. It's never happened to me but if you're talking to a few different people at the same time it's possible to get names mixed up. I am starting to wonder if that degree of Jason's is for clown college. And also if Courtney ever got in contact with the real Jason if there was one. This is the reason why I called all my dates " Scooter" to avoid such situations.

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  3. I call all my dates Bruce, even the women. It would get too confusing otherwise.

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    Replies
    1. Do you also tell them "Don't bring me down"?

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    2. The song lyrics are up for debate.I thought it was Bruce too but other lyrics say Brrooss or Groos but since Bruce is my husbands name I say Bruce because I always sing that song to him.Except at work when I call him Kevin.

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    3. From Wikipedia in case you were interested:

      A common mondegreen in the song is the perception that, following the title line, Lynne shouts "Bruce!" In the liner notes of the ELO compilation Flashback and elsewhere, Lynne has explained that he is singing a made-up word, "Grooss," which some have suggested sounds like the German expression "Gruß." After the song's release, so many people had misinterpreted the word as "Bruce" that Lynne actually began to sing the word as "Bruce" for fun at live shows

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    4. Nobody got the Monty Python reference?

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    5. I recognized the Monty Python reference but forgot to mention it.

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  4. I can only think of 3 good reasons to let a woman call me the wrong name for over a week....

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  5. *Unrelated to dating story when I was a kid* For many years my neighbor, a nice old man with no teeth who'd lived a hard life and was very hard to understand, apparently thought my name was "Joe". (for the record, my name isn't Joe) He would walk up and, apparently, say "Hey, Joe." and I thought he was saying "Hello" because I couldn't understand him. So, for years, anytime a package was delivered to the wrong place (which happened way more than it really should have) he would tell them no one by name lived at my parent's place and so I would have to go to the post office to get all my packages. This went on for close to a decade.

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