[shazow]

Or even worse: When a barista takes my name for my order, I say "Andrey." Usually they'll spell it "Andre" but whatever.

Five minutes later, more often than not, they call out "Aubrey." That's reading their own handwriting.

You can't explain that.

:P

[CodeMage]

It can get worse than that ;)

I originally come from Serbia, but I spent the last 14 years in Chile, where most people seemed to choke on my name: Vojislav. When pronounced correctly, it's "voice love", but nobody outside the territory of ex-Yugoslavia knows how to read it correctly.

When it came to buying coffee and stuff like that, I had the choice of explaining my name ad nauseum or adopting an easier one. I decided to call myself "Boris", thanks to telemarketers who would recover from my name by changing it to something they could deal with ;-)

Anyway, that worked quite fine for years and years, until it started failing, ironically at the Starbucks inside a mall with the highest concentration of tourists and immigrants. I would say "Boris" and two times out of five they would write down "Maurice".

The cherry on top inevitable came five minutes later, when a different barista would call out "Mauricio".

Fortunately, I moved before I gave in to temptation to do what a friend of mine did on a regular basis: give "Spongebob" as his name :P

[philwelch]

I had a Serbian coworker once named Dragan. Despite how awesome his name was, he often went by "Mike", usually for similar reasons.

[keerthiko]

There's a conspiracy theory that Starbucks and other large cafe chains intentionally misspell names, so that the customer will take a picture and facebook/instagram it, as free advertising for the place.

If it isn't true, it certainly should be. If I opened a coffee shop tomorrow, I would instruct all my baristas to misspell the customer names for this reason.

[mthoms]

Better still - write flattering descriptions. "Cute guy with red shirt", "Woman in pretty dress", etc.

[danieltillett]

Very clever. I have seen a similar idea used where people gossip loudly in a public place saying nice things about the person they want to ingratiate themselves with who is not present but who can overhear.

[CocaKoala]

Yeah, names in coffeeshops is an entirely separate issue; trying to hear a name when there's a lot of background noise and a hard time limit before it becomes awkward and other customers get angry about the line being held up is pretty rough.

I've actually taken to giving them my full legal first name as opposed to the nickname I usually go by, because the nickname is phonetically ambiguous and the full name isn't.

[obvio]

I just use a pseudonym which is unmistakable, usually a really local name that even though my accent isn't perfect they'll be able to understand it!

[smackfu]

I think it's pretty interesting. If I write both those names in cursive, they look surprisingly similar.

[ahomescu1]

Worst I've got was "Avery" (instead of Andrei).