The Name Game

At branches of a certain well-known coffee shop, they have started this practice of asking for the customer's name. They write the name on the cup, but I honestly can't think why - there are so many thousands of different configurations that customers can choose from the menu, they are unlikely to be confused.

My name is derived from Scottish Gaelic, so it is pretty hard for the Asian servers to translate into writing, it seems. To be fair, it is quite unusual to have a name with three vowels in a row, and it's just as difficult for me to grasp Cantonese names (like "Xa" in my skiing class).

So I now play a little game. I pick a slightly comedic but staunchly North American name and see how they fare with that. Today's was "Troy", after the Simpsons Celebrity Troy McClure (as in Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such other medical films as "Mommy, What's On That Man's Face?" and "Alice Doesn't Live Anymore".)

So this was what it turned out as (after a lot of spelling and quite a bit of laughter on all sides)... So I'm glad it's not just Scottish names that get mangled!