What's in a name?

Don’t you just hate it when that happens. You know, when somebody comes up to speak to you and you can’t for the life of you remember their name.

It happened to me once at the airport just as we’d checked our bags in and started to amble away from the queue. As I glanced around a girl in the queue spoke to me and caught me right off guard.

‘I know what you’re thinking – I should know that face from somewhere,’ she said to me confidently.

Actually I was thinking, if I don’t find the loos quickly there’s gonna be a huge puddle here in the middle of check-in area 4.

The thing is, even when she spoke to me and I looked towards her, I hadn’t the foggiest idea who she was. 

No siree, nothing registered up in the old grey matter to suggest that – ‘well now that you mention it your face does look familiar.’

So, I had to wing it and edged towards her wondering how I was ever going to talk my way out of this one.

And then it hit me – her baggage label – all I’d have to do is get a glance at the label and I’d be okay. But the dang thing was hanging on the case at a very awkward angle this was going to be tough.

‘So off to America then too,’ I said dumbly, since she was standing in the same queue I’d been in and the plane wasn’t going anywhere else.

‘Yeah,’ she said, but she sensed my unease and just as she added ‘you don’t know me do you,’ her hand moved, the label flapped around and I confidently replied – ‘yeah, course I do and proceeded to tell her.’

The thing is, once I saw her name I knew right away who she was – what hadn’t struck me until much later was of course that if she’d been married to the guy she was standing in line with and who I definitely didn’t recognise (and who I’m sure saw me looking at the label) and she had taken his surname - I’d still have been stumped.

Yeah, so, it’s all very well when you’re at an airport and somebody happens to have a name-tag on their case for you to get a glance at, but these old memory blanks can hit anywhere and rarely is there a way out like I had at the airport.

After all there are not too many people who trundle a case up and down the street to the shops.

So what do you do when a sudden memory blank hits when you’ve been spoken to by somebody who obviously recognises you and who thinks you should know them too?

Do you small talk in the hope that something will trigger a memory, or do you just get away with a ‘ah, how are you,’ and walk away torturing yourself all day trying to think, now ‘who was that then?’

One old guy I knew said he had a solution because he called everybody male ‘Matt’ and everybody female ‘Mary.’

“Ah, It’s much simpler than trying to remember a whole lot of names,’ he told me one time, adding ‘and it means I never get anybody’s name wrong.’

Course it meant that he actually got most peoples' name wrong, but that never seemed to bother him too much.

To me there were just a couple of things wrong with his logic. For starters, every conversation would start as if there was an echo.

John: ‘Well how are you Matt?’

Paddy: ‘Ah, not so bad Matt.’

Mick: ‘How’s Matt, and Matt?’

John: ‘Fine Matt’

Paddy:  ‘Grand Matt.’

Another thing if the men were all Matts, well women would just walk all over us, wouldn’t they?

The real bugging thing for me though is that it wouldn’t be my right name!
And it gets on my nerves when some people I know seem always to get a mental block when they see me and feel obliged to call me by the first of my brothers’ names they can think of.

To be honest it’s not a new thing. I mean it happened (as I suspect it does in most families) when I was growing up – ‘I said stop that racket Raymondjosephconor, I mean Liam.’

It was even worse if my mother struggled with one of the girls names, with eight of them in the family it was like a litany sometimes before she got the right one out.’

But then that’s something you never mind (and even have a laugh at) in your family. You expect more from strangers don’t you!

I mean they might only ever see you once in a while, but you still expect that the very least they could do is get your damn name right.

You know, maybe I’ll start hauling a suitcase around with me after all…