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During a meeting with six colleagues last week, one of them asked for a hand surgeon recommendation. I spoke up and told her I knew a great guy, but that I couldn’t pronounce his name. so I just call him ‘Dr. O’. I explained that I’d send his contact info after the meeting, but it’s something like ‘oh-uga-chuka-muka’, to which the group giggled. They weren’t laughing at the name, they were laughing at my inability to spit it out, so to speak. As a way of explaining why it was so difficult to pronounce, I added that it was an “African name with something like 14 letters”.
Later that day, I got a call from HR letting me know that they received a complaint from someone in the meeting about my disrespectful pronunciation and the fact that I cited it as an African name. The woman who complained is in fact African American. I am white.
The doctor’s name is Dr. Ogheneochuko.
HR is currently investigating and interviewing the other meeting participants, so I don’t know what the repercussions will be.
What are your thoughts on the matter?
P.S. This is my first post on Reddit EVER, so if I’m doing this wrong, please tell me! I read all the rules, but since I don’t even understand all the terminology, I’m still not sure what I’m doing!
I remember when we got a new Manager and I think he was East Asian. He came in and introduced himself and he had a common and easily spelled, read and pronounced first name. But his last name came from his lineage.
So, he asked US would anyone like to TRY and pronounce his last name? I look at the email and I said I would try. Everyone looked at me like I had TWO heads or something when I pronounced it and all I did was take my time and read phonetically.
It was “Pakianathan” evidently people screw it up all the time and I’m assuming that because first HE asked us to try to pronounce it when he first met us. I thinking he has had it happen sooooo much that he is like like get this out of the way first. And he was surprised when I pronounced it correctly, and immediately looked at my desk and saw my name and even though it simple to spell, read and pronounce. He asked me how it was pronounced (because people pronounce it differently) and he would always come to me first if I was in the room to ask a question.
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- 8 months ago
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Haha, yeah that was it. It wasn’t hard, just had to sound it out. Now I will say when I received a call from an employer about a job years later the guy said his first and last name (it was of Nigerian descent) I didn’t catch it so on the call for the interview I never attempted to repeat it. When I received his email with the info for the interviews I saw why I didn’t understand him. To make a long story short, I Googled it and figured out how to pronounce it since if I got the job that I would definitely have to speak with him again and didn’t want to just call him “Sir.” But once I got on the job, he did go by just his initials.