Keep those name misunderstanding stories coming! From the comments: I'm especially amazed that "Sarah" turns into "Sharon" and thoroughly enjoy "Mir. Like the space station." Together with your wife Kat, you're a meerkat!

I seem to have neglected to mention my name hassles. When I was young, sometimes "Harihareswara" didn't fit on standardized test forms, so I imagine there are a bunch of 99-percentile algebra scores filed under Sumana Hariharesw. I also got very used to helping out substitute teachers by listening for a long pause after, say, Erin Griffith's name got called, and saying "That's probably me." I used to pronounce it "Hurry-hurry-sure-ah" to make it easy for USians, but now I pronounce it rather more authentically, basically as "HA-ree-ha-RAY-shwa-ra" but with enough nuance and trilling that I probably need to brush up on my IPA to do it justice. Best joke about my last name (old pronunciation): middle-school colleague and my-bus-stop-sharer Levi Tinney's "Hurry hurry rush me to the hospital." Best joke about the new pronunciation: no real contenders yet! Operators are standing by.

I used to spell out my name in letter groups of four-four-five, but this caused problems as people got confused about where the I and the E went, and whether my name was Hareswara and I'd misspoken. Then my mom or dad suggested I use "H-A-R [pause] I-H-A [pause] R-E-S [pause] W-A-R-A" and that works pretty well. I usually specify "S as in Sugar" to make sure people don't hear it as an F. When I was at Salon, though, Tom Fuhrman sat in a cubicle near me and mocked "S as in Sugar," saying I sounded like a breathy hooker. I switched to saying "S as in Salon" when he was around.

I like it when big names in US politics or media have names that news anchors have to learn to pronounce, like Blagojevich, Shyamalan, Sotomayor, or Stephanopoulos, because there's some part of me that identifies with them. If I have fantasies of fame, I can always put in that cinematic detail where a pretty face is getting its makeup done and chanting my last name thirty seconds before the camera rolls.

I basically don't care how people pronounce my first name -- where they put the stresses, what kinds of vowel sounds they use, whatever. Some people find it helpful to think of the "Suman" part as rhyming with the English word "woman" but native Indians often make more of an "ah" sound in the second syllable instead of an "eh" or "uh" sound. But really, I've gotten jokes about "Summer," "Sumer," "Somalia," "Sumeria," "Soma," and one gym teacher who wanted to call me Sue (better than the other gym teacher that year, who asked in frustration if he could call me "Hiyakawa" - some kind of Native American pastiche I assume?). So any good-faith attempt is fine by me.

But as I said, I'm not fussed about people pronouncing it "SOO-mah-nah" or "suh-MAH-nah" or "SUM-ah-nah" or what have you. It's more irritating when random strangers or customer service folks hear my name and take like two minutes asking about it and iterating pronunciations, even when I tell them it doesn't matter. This is one reason I prefer to use "Vikki" when I can -- when random waiters, or other people who will only ever know me for an hour, insist on taking my time to learn to pronounce my name correctly, I get irritated. It's a novelty to them; to me, it's just another reminder that I'm Different. Why are you placing your comfort over mine? These are often the same people who say "what a beautiful name! where's it from? what does it mean?" When Salon customers did this to me, I usually responded by answering, then exoticizing them right back. Where does your name come from, Jeff or Allison or Keith or Emily? What does your name mean?

Now, I don't want to make my friends worry here. If you actually know me I don't mind helping you learn to say my name. I just don't want to spend time every day teaching strangers about it. I'd rather be teaching them about open source.