Names

Alicia’s husband hates me, Sonja’s parents are deaf. It can be incredibly difficult to remember people’s names. My friend Nick once met a girl five times and could never recall her name, I once had a girl come up to me while I was crossing the quad in college and tell me she was supposed to introduce herself to me when I was sober.

It’s definitely not an easy task to keep peoples names straight, especially when you’re not sure that you care. Drinking also does not help the situation. I met two guys that I went to high school with tonight, yes you read that correctly and yes it seemed a little weird. In my defense the high school that we attended was very large, about 3,000 kids, and these guys were a year behind me. Regardless of those mitigating circumstances while I vaguely recognized one of the pair, I would have sworn on a stack of bibles, despite that fact that I am either a non-practicing pagan, agnostic or an atheist depending on which day you ask me, that I had never before seen the other dude. Luckily, I suppose, my buddy Eric new who they were.

Eric is much better at remembering names than I am, mostly because he is smart enough to use them in whole sentences, such as Ethan is a season ticket holder, or either of the two that I stole from him to begin this essay. I, on the other hand, am absolutely fucking terrible at this game. I meet a lot of people in my day to day life, it involves boats and schmoozing, not writing, it’s kind of a long story, and for the most part I can’t remember their names seconds after they’ve introduced themselves. This may make me a bad person. It certainly won’t help the networking skills that my small expensive liberal arts college considered so important. I make snap judgments on whether or not I will ever meet people again and therefore if I will need to know their name at all. I would say that around 90% of the time I decide that the person in question is not someone with whom I will again cross paths and so I think about something else while he or she tells me his or her name. If I go on to have an interesting conversation with the person I feel bad about having either forgotten or never paid attention to their name. This would mean that my snap decision was wrong; this happens maybe 25% of the time. Probably less, seeing as how most people think I’m some sort of pirate and I hate people who think I’m a pirate and therefore don’t need to know or remember their names. If in the course of a conversation I decide that I have underestimated my new acquaintance and that I would indeed like to know their name I can normally pull of something along the lines of; ‘I’m sorry I’m bad with names, you were…?’ while shaking their hand and making eye contact. I’m good at eye contact. It scares some people when you manage to make and maintain eye contact; sometimes I do it just because I think that it’s interesting that it trips a lot of people up. It makes it easier for me to pull off this ‘I’m bad with names’ crap because I’m cute and have a nice smile; this does not mean that I am not full of shit. I am most definitely full of it, I have a government degree.

All of this is really just to say that it’s nice when you can remember someone’s name; they will appreciate the fact that you paid attention. They will feel good, so will you. This should be an easy thing for us to do, but it is decidedly not. Eric and Nick, another friend of mine who also recognized Ethan but could not remember his name, agree that it is a great way to end a conversation, especially one with business connotations, by using someone’s name. Let’s just hope you can remember if it’s Jim or James or maybe it was Jeff or John or Jamie could it have been Jake?

Say it with me everyone; Alicia’s husband hates me, and Sonja’s parents are deaf.

Note: This essay was originally written on 1/11/07 and appeared on an earlier version of this site