When I was fifteen, my mother sat me
down and told me that when I grew up, I should change my last name.
From what it was, to, oh, anything else. I was horrified. I assured
her that I would never change my last name. I have kept it ever
since. But you know what? My mother had a point.
My last name is hard to pronounce,
and hard even to imagine. It is: Robison. There’s no ‘n’ in the
middle! It’s not Robinson. And it is not pronounced Rahbison,
either. The first ‘o’ is long.
When my mother, in middle age,
entered graduate school, the bursar looked at her name on her papers
and said, “You do mean Robinson, don’t you?”
When I explained to my friends in
teenage camp that there was only one n in my last name, they called
me Robinso.
Today, I watched my doctor speak
into a microphone to record the results of my visit. This is the 21st
century, so he was talking to a speech-to-text system, not just
making an audio recording. As you know, speech-to-text logic is not
exactly perfect, and sometimes he had to stop, delete some words, and
speak again. The first time he mentioned my name, he said, “Mr.
Robison ... delete ... Rahbison...”
“It’s Robison!” I said.
He looked at me apologetically. “I
have to say Rahbison or the computer will spell it wrong,” he said.
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