I had a conversation with a salesperson one time that got off to a bad start. Very often sales types start off by trying to move much too quickly to a level of intimacy that they are not really entitled to. This guy was no exception. He started off and without taking a breath said something like \u201cHello Alfred. Your friends call you Al? Can I call you Al?\u201d<\/p>\n
I replied that \u201cMy friends call me Alfred but you can call me Al.\u201d It threw him off his game which made me very happy. <\/p>\n
I don\u2019t go by \u201cAl.\u201d And if fact I know very few people named \u201cAlfred\u201d who like \u201cAl\u201d as a nickname\/diminutive. Many of them put up with it anyway (my Dad does) just because it is the path of least resistance. I never have. \u201cAl\u201d is short for \u201cAllen\/Alan\u201d or \u201cAlbert\u201d but it is not, in my mind, short for \u201cAlfred.\u201d \u201cAlf\u201d is short for \u201cAlfred\u201d and I\u2019m a lot more accepting of that though few people use it for me. Those people are almost all close family and I don\u2019t generally invite people to use \u201cAlf.\u201d<\/p>\n
I find that people generally want to be addressed by the name they introduce themselves with. I introduce myself as \u201cAlfred.\u201d And that is the name I recognize as mine. In fact one time I was walking though a mall with friends and one of them said \u201cI think that person is calling you.\u201d It turned out that someone I knew (a more or less work relationship) was calling me but they were calling \u201cAl.\u201d I would no more hear that as someone calling me than I would if they have been calling \u201cCharley.\u201d<\/p>\n
Speaking of \u201cCharley\u201d I once worked with a salesman who insisted on calling one person we called on for business as \u201cCharley.\u201d He introduced himself as \u201cCharles\u201d and all his co-workers called him \u201cCharles.\u201d I pointed this out one day and the salesmen blew it off saying \u201che likes being called \u201cCharley.\u201d It didn\u2019t seem that way to me but well we didn\u2019t get the business. Was that a factor? Who knows. But I do know that someone who calls me \u201cAl\u201d is pretty unlikely to get my business. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had a conversation with a salesperson one time that got off to a bad start. Very often sales types start off by trying to move much too quickly to a level of intimacy that they are not really entitled to. This guy was no exception. He started off and without taking a breath said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mrt","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}