It's all in the name

Let's say my husband's name is Robert. It's not, but it's an equally traditional, kind of boring, but completely fine name. Fine enough that popular teen vampire literature is centered around a character with this very same name. There are a variety of diminutives based on the name Robert - Rob, Bob, Bobby - these are the most widely used nicknames, but my husband, for reasons that are obscure and based on his father's pretentiousness (I love my father-in-law, but the man is overly concerned with family appearances), goes by the name Bert. Not an unheard of shortening of Robert, but certainly not the first one to come to mind.

This means that when people are trying to pretend that they know my husband, they usually use one of the traditional nicknames. If they call him Bob or Rob, I know that they don't really know my husband. This is a useful skill when avoiding telemarketers. My husband occasionally lets this charade of which name he goes by go on for a long time, particularly when it comes to people he doesn't realize at first will be important to him when he first meets them, so he doesn't bother to correct them, thinking it will be a once or twice meeting and then he or she will go away.

Enter our rental management company manager.

When we first met her, she called him Robert. My dear husband just didn't realize that we would have a very cozy relationship with our management office in the future. He was okay with Robert, since that is, after all, his name. But then she kept shortening it - first it was Bob, then the completely ludicrous Bobby. We were in constant contact with her because things kept going wrong (our rent check got lost in the mail, we had bugs, the empty neighboring apartment's smoke alarm kept going off at random times in the middle of the day and night, etc.). Then came the paperwork that mistakenly said we weren't married.

I emailed her to let her know that the paperwork was wrong. She told me I had to provide written documentation that we were married. It turns out an email was good enough for that purpose: NGS and Robert were married on May 24, 2008. Simple enough.

She told me that she would slip the new, updated to show we were married paperwork under our door and one of us would have to slip the old, not married paperwork under our resident manager's door. I emailed her back saying, "Bert will slip in under the caretaker's door when he gets home today."

She emailed me back: "Bert?"

Me: "Robert."

Her: "I've been calling him Bobby."

Me: "I know."

So we got a note slipped under our door from the manager addressed to NGS and Bert, letting us know she's leaving for another job. At long last, she has figured out his name!! However, we now have to break in an entirely new person in the rental company office. Our work is never done.