Thursday 16 July 2015

Awkward

I am, as we know, overly sensitive to not wanting to upset people.  Often, especially strangers.  Which maybe makes it even weirder.  Or certainly more frustrating on my end... anyway...

I was buying groceries earlier this week and the person serving me was a young woman.  Early twenties maybe.  A bigger woman, with glasses and a ponytail.  And a name tag that said James.

And I wanted to ask her about her name.  Because James is a cool name for a girl and maybe there's a cool story about why she was given it.

But then I thought I shouldn't ask.  Because maybe she's in transition and James will be her name.  Or maybe... I don't know.  Maybe she would have thought I was incredibly rude to ask? 

Or, really, maybe she forgot her name tag and just grabbed a random one.  Or maybe her name just looks like James and is pronounced some other way or maybe I'd offend James by asking gender related questions.

Argh.  And ugh.  I just wanted to know what the deal was.  But I couldn't think of a way to ask that wouldn't potentially upset or make me seem rude.

It shouldn't be this complicated y'all.

3 comments:

Anne Roy said...

Might the tags at the shop be surnames? Calling people by their surnames is often done over here (England) ... but I think using the name tag of someone else is likely ...
you could hold it as a mystery ...

Cdn Anne in England

Bad.Days said...

As a girl who has a traditional boy's name, I'm a little tired of having people ask me about it...because almost everyone does.

It's not like I had any control over it, it's just a name that was in my mom's family and my parents liked (so no crazy interesting story). I find it really weird when people compliment me on it or tell me it's neat. I smile and nod, but it's just my name.

Victoria said...

I suppose it could be Anne, but that's not typically done in this store.

Thanks for the insight Bad.Days! I appreciate hearing that :)