Just Don't Call Us Late For Supper

Today Matt and I spent an hour and a half seeking that emblem of legitimacy known as a Virginia driver's license. And, at long last, we each now have a single document that serves as both photo ID and bearer of our legal names. I know, it's almost too much to handle--and I was really getting used to toting the court order around with us. The next step? Getting our emissions tested so we can title the car in Virginia so we can register it so we can get get in-state plates!

Of course, the multiplicitousness of our names made us a big hit at the DMV. After confiding to me that "the men who come with their fists and want everything done their way" were "not very good for harmony," the kind (if confusing) old woman who helped me became convinced (due to the way it's listed on my Iowa driver's license--and she's not the first to make the mistake) that not only had I changed my last name twice, but that I was now attempting to change my first name from Amanda to my middle name, Katie. ("Amanda over here is making some changes to her name," she told one of the other clerks.") No wonder she was confused. And the woman "helping" Matt kept telling him that he didn't write his "real name" on the application. Frustrated, he finally barked at her, "THIS IS MY NAME. AS IT'S WRITTEN RIGHT HERE." Eventually she allowed that it wasn't even the last name she was concerned about but the fact that he had put his middle intial, rather than his full middle name, in the spot marked "MI." Imagine that.

This is a similar reaction to the ones I've gotten as I call our credit card companies, etc. I've had a number of people ask if the new last name is hyphenated--after spending the past 8 months lugging around a hyphenated name and wondering if anybody had even heard of the concept. Despite carefully phrasing my request as being that "My HUSBAND AND I have changed BOTH of OUR nameS and WE need to update THEM on OUR cardS", ING still only changed mine--telling me when I called that they would "need some documentation if HE wants to change his name"; after I pointed out that I had already mailed it, for both of us, they said somewhat perplexedly "Yes, I guess you did, I don't know why we didn't update it." I don't either. Progressive went ahead and updated my last name to Matt's (despite the awkwardly precise wording of the above statement) before I could get them to understand the actual change. And at the end of the call, they usually address me as Mrs. Some-Mutated-Combination of all three of the names (along the lines of "Hellenbrullens," which is how my sister suggested we combine them), and thank me for my business. Oh, no. Thank you.

As a result, Matt and I have started blowing off steam by postulating what we could have chosen that would have been simpler, and then imagining how people would screw that up anyway. Because our first names are relatively simple, and people screw those up too. The dry cleaner in DC had Matt's name listed as "Met." He's also gotten a number of people who ask "So it's just M-A-T?" And I had someone ask me "Katie, that's just K-A-T, right?" Mat and Kat...yup, you've got it. I'll have to update the title of the blog. Not to mention everybody who insists that it's not my "real" name, which must be Katherine or Kathleen. Anyway, today we played the same little game with street names, something else that seems to baffle anybody we try to give it to. "We should have just tried to find someplace on Main street." "No, then they would think 'Oh, like a horse's Mane?'" "Or 'Maine, like the state?'" We just can't win on this, can we?