I spent most of five minutes this morning convincing one of our clients that we do not, in fact, have an engineer on staff named “Karen.”
We can’t all be 100% detail-oriented all of the time. I know this. The process of reading comprehension involves a lot of mental streamlining, the eye pulling in patterns and the brain supplying meaning of some sort as the reader goes along. Thus, when people read my name in print their brains often fill in the meaning for what looks like a familiar pattern. And so, the myth of “Karen” perpetuates.
I shrug this off most of the time, but this particular client isn’t brand new and has dealt with me several times in recent weeks. And yet:
“Yeah, some gal there set up this new account…”
“Actually, that was me.”
“Huh? Sez here it was this Karen person.”
“Check again.”
“Huh?”
“Look at the email again. Are you certain it says ‘Karen’ at the bottom?”
“Uh.”
Eventually he saw the light of day.
I’ve noted before that we moved quite often when I was a youngster. Every few months it was a new set of teachers, new people at the church on Sunday (during Mom’s religious-leaning stretches) and so forth. Every few months I suffered a barrage of “Karen” and “Carol” and “Kara” miscues. Lots of teeth grinding on my part, as you can imagine. Add this to my scrawny physique and unstable home life and it’s a wonder I grew up reasonably sane at all given what a natural bully-magnet I was.
I still have to grit my teeth on occasion. Today was one of them. Normally, though, I can just laugh it off and forget about it, so it’s not like I’m constantly hung up about this.
Even so, I’m probably going to punch my father in the arm the next time I see him. Just on general principle.
