Ahhhhh, so satisfying! I sent in my Hollywood Car Wash rewrite this morning after denying myself a fun trip over the weekend, so that feels good. Now I’m taking the rest of the day off, then moving on to ANOTHER rewrite. Because that’s how I roll.
So–how was your weekend? The podcast is off for a week because we’re travelling and Stephan is recording, but we’ll be back with all new funny on the 1st of June. Stay tuned! And, if you miss us too much, you can always go back and listen to old episodes here.
I don’t know if you have this experience, and maybe you don’t if your name is something like Joe Smith, but for some reason, Lori Culwell is a name that customer service reps just can’t get their heads around. And when I say “customer service reps,” of course I mean people at Starbucks who want to write “Laury” on my coffee cups, and people who email me who call me “Lorie” even though they’ve known me for eight years, and (this one is my personal favorite), people who send me unsolicited product offers in the mail, with name spellings so baroque I can only assume they heard my name somewhere, copied it down on an already-dirty piece of paper, then crumpled that up, then spilled coffee on it, then used one of those blacklights from CSI to see what it actually said. I have a collage of these hilarious misspellings somewhere in storage which we started in San Francisco. It includes such gems as Loris Ailwell, Laurie Colwell, Lori Codwell, Lomis Coldwell, Lori Culmell, Laurie Colvell, Caldwell, Cowell, Cowbell, Cormell, Cornell, Colwell, Coldwell, Cod-well, Coldwell Banker.
Maybe you think I’m kidding about this, but I’m not. The other day I got a check made out to (wait for it):
Glori Culmell.
A check! I have to take that to the bank and try to deposit it with a straight face, dude. And, if anyone asks for ID verification because that’s not the name on my account, guess what? I don’t have it, because my name is, in fact, NOT Glori Culmell.
I have to admit I might be at least a little culpable in this, since over the years my handwriting has been trending toward the chicken-scratchy, and I guess if you add this to human error and the imperfect art of OCR scanning, you could get something like Glori Culmell. But, I will also say that this is a familiar experience for me:
Me: “Yes, the name is Culwell, C-U-L-W-E-L-L
Customer Service Person : “Ok, C-O-L”
Me: “No, C-U-L”
CSP: “Right, C-O-L-D”
Me: “No! C-U-L”
And so on. So, I guess we can understand where the misinterpretations come in. And, if you’re wondering why I didn’t just go ahead and change my name when I got married, understand that I heard this story and WORSE from the Cox family about how people are always misspelling their name. So, I chose to continue the plight of Glori Culmell rather than take on the mantle of “Cox—is that C-O-C-K-S?”