Name Problems (Comedy Open Mic Round 17)

Let it be first said that had I chosen to school at any university in my state this dilemma and, by extension, this article may not have seen the light of the day anymore than a man's tiny black portal of yellow fibre discharge.

_{Apologies if yours is caucausian, negro or red. I don't take likely to shit racists.}

I have made my third trip to the hospital in as many as days trying to figure out if I am pregnant, sadly, half of that time has been spent teaching hospital personnel how to pronounce my name. My full name has 11 syllables; surname: 4, first name: 5, second name: 2.

_{Everytime i stand on a queue waiting to be served, my name is waiting to be murdered.}

If the hospital where I receive my treatments had opted for e-routes like biometric thumb printing instead of the manual process, this story would have been different. But neh, apparently, e-processes are too slow. That is why, for example, the best way to speak to anyone in Finland is to walk there by feet instead of placing a call.

With the manual process, I get the honor of being told I am an impostor since the name on my ID card is always different from the one written down. It is totally understandable they evaded that moron thing called thinking which should have allowed them to always ask for my ID card and dub my name directly into their records. But no. They stopped doing that after they graduated from school and found a religious fanatic who told them that copying the work of others like they did in their final year exams were frowned upon by Jesus although it will in no way affect their competency at doing the job their certificate gotten through lying and cheating says they can.

I do not still blame them as even my parents can’t pronounce “Leonard” - my English name – as “Lenad”. God forbid. It has to be “Lio-nad.” They gave me the name after all.

For this reason, I chose to run away from home. I ran, far and away towards the deep southern part of Nigeria only to bump in on a land who pronounced letter “J” as “Y” and a whole lot of other weird interchanging of consonants and vowels. At this point, I stopped complaining.

In a country with at least 250 different languages, it takes just one turn to have your native name murdered by a strange tongue and apparently all English names that sounds different from the way they are spelt, go through the gallows too. Finding anyone in Nigeria who can pronounce “Leonard” as “Lenad” is like finding any male up to the age of reasoning in Iraq without a side-goat he ain’t discharging his civic duties into. So that’s fair.

For the mean time, I have been taking matters into my hands: snatching forms from them personnel and doing the filling myself. It worked for a while until I was arrested after a melancholic female attending accused me of grabbing her boobs in the process.

Pretending to have seizures whenever I was asked my name didn’t help since I saw the shadows of my ancestors after the nurses actually administered seizure-reducing syringe while I battled in vein. That day I prayed to Allah, Jesus and Buddah.

Finally, I went for the pretending-to-be-deaf route to force them to hand me all forms and medical bills to be filling myself till I overheard my doctor telling his colleague he be giving me an anal examination to which I replied "over my dead body," blew my cover and got myself arrested again.

---

---

---

_{I nominate @misterakpan and @chidiarua to put in an entry for the this or next round.}

_{imagesource:pexels.com}