blog of kaiyen

I kept meaning to write this earlier – the day after our election, when Barack Obama was elected to office – but things have been busy.

As a very quick note, it has been interesting seeing how after the election, a lot more has been made of the fact that he will be the first African-American president ever.  Yes, it was brought up before, especially in the context of how the “you can do anything you want in America” would have a whole lot more meaning should he gain office.  But for the most part people and pundits talked about how the issue was the best person for the job, the person most capable of fixing the economy, etc.

But just hours after he was declared the winner it was all about race.  Very interesting.

Even more interesting was that on CNN’s “best political team” of analysts, the one African-American among them, when asked about the significance of the election, talked about how it was really about the voters picking the person they thought was best for the job.  The other four analysts all talked about race.

Not quite an effective variant on Shakespeare, but I try.

So my name is Allan Chen.  It is the least common of the three frequent ways to spell my given name – Allen and Alan are far more common.  I honestly have never cared when people have spelled my name wrong.  I don’t bother correcting people or anything.  However, it has been a problem lately, as at work e-mail addresses and names are auto-filled and there is an Allen Chan here, which of course shows up right away if you spell my first name wrong and it sure looks about right as a full name, too.  Recently, someone sent a meeting invitation to this other person, and earlier this year someone sent a whole series of e-mails to him before it was determined that it was the wrong person.

Now I’m confronted with a bit of a dilemma.  I have never made a deal about the spelling of my name, but it has proven to be an actual problem.  So do I start going around telling everyone how to spell it?  Do I come off sounding like I’ve been offended by it?  Ugh.

One thing that has always surprised me is that people don’t notice the mistake.  Especially in e-mail exchanges.  If you think about how e-mail responses are formatted, with the original text quoted below the next text, you have something like this:

blah blah

thanks,
allan

>hello allen

blah blah previous e-mail

So there’s the correct spelling right above the wrong spelling.  Yet I’ve gotten maybe 5 e-mails my entire electronic life where people have noticed the diference and commented/apologized for it.