"WO"s by Any Other Name...

When Amy and I married, we both hyphenated our names. It's a perfectly legal and cromulent thing to do, but if some people had a hard time figuring out what she did, people weren't prepared at all for me to do that.

My first indication of that came when I was at the county office to get our marriage license. Toward the end of the process, as things were wrapping up, the lady at the counter went into her spiel, like you do for boilerplate instructions.

"And if your wife wants to change her name, she just needs to [blah blah whatever the process was]."

Oh. So... that means I do it differently?

"Huh?"

You said that for my wife to change her name, she whatever-whatevers. I'm asking if that means I need to go through a different process.

(ten second pause as she tried to process that)

And, I mean, this was 2004. Not exactly an unenlightened time in human history. I think I'm fairly progressive, but by no means an outlier. And this was in a city—Ann Arbor—that's so known for ingrained liberalism that its name alone is sort of a shorthand punchline. Someone whose job is to dole out marriage licenses is thrown by our practice? Sure it's unusual, but we weren't the first people to do it.

We're divorced now.

And even so, the paperwork included a space to notate, if desired, "the wife's name changes to [...]". No space for the husband, if that's what he wants to do. And never mind that there are some marriages in which you can't speak of "the" wife, because either there are two of them, or none at all. No matter.

In the space directly underneath, I wrote "The husband's name changes to Erik Ivar Olsen." Even though my handwriting doesn't resemble Times New Roman, the judge signed off on it. I was able to change my name with my bank, the Secretary of State and the Social Security office just by showing them the decree and asking them to change it. Other places, like my doctors' offices, changed my name based on nothing more than my say-so. Occasionally it took a heartbeat to register with them. Sometimes I had to explain the situation more fully. But eventually it would get done.

My health insurance still had my hyphenated name, and frankly, I was dreading the process of getting it changed back, because of the rigmarole I'd been through. And it was making problems. Occasionally it worked, but lately I was getting it kicked back at me. A couple of times, there was a prescription drug with a non-insurance price that was trivially more than my co-pay, so, fine. Path of least resistance. And then two prescriptions declined; together, they represented about $500.

I was at the point where not fixing it became more painful than fixing it.

So. I called, ran through my situation, and asked if I could request the change over the phone, or what else I needed to do.

Long-ass pause.

Oh, no, the line didn't drop. She just couldn't parse what I was saying. After running through it again, she got it. Or at least she understood it just enough to pass the buck.

"OK. We're going to need the request in writing. You can fax it to Mr. Whoever at (734)..."

Huh. Fax? Not email?

"Yeah, we're not so much email people he-ee-ee-re?"

Fine. Fax it is. Thank you very much, have a great weekend.

So I signed up for a free trial of an online fax service, because I'm not from the past. On the cover sheet I outlined the situation again: When I signed up with you, this was my name. I'm now divorced, and one of the provisions was a name change. Judge signed off, it's legal, the state's good with it, Social Security is good with it, this is my name. What do I need to do to make the change happen with you? Please don't fax me back because this is a temporary number, but you can call me at [normal number] or preferably email, kthxbai.

And of course the fax service couldn't handle me attaching images of my updated cards, so I uploaded them to an online photo album, made it private but shareable, and even ran it through a URL shortener so they wouldn't have to retype a crazy long string of characters. (Yes, if they were email people they could have just clicked, but, you know. Whevz. Their house, their rules, and I'll play along if it means I don't have to drop five hundo.)

Two weeks pass.

Today I get a call.

"So we got your fax, but I don't quite understand what you're asking."

OK. Where's the problem?

"So... what, you got divorced, and you want to take someone else off the account? Because I see you only have one person on this account."

Right. One person. My name was one thing when I joined. Then after the divorce, it changed.

"Oh. But... how...?"

Have you really never had this situation before?

"...No?"

Nobody has ever joined, then gotten married or divorced, and then needed to have the insurance reflect a legal name change?

"I mean... never a MAN, though!"

And a little half giggle.

And out came my Snark Passenger.

OK. Ma'am? Let's pretend, just for the moment, that I'm a woman. Don't let my voice throw you. Just for the purposes of this call, I'm going to be 100% lady. Can you change my name now?

"I mean, yeah, but..."

No. I don't like "but". Can we skip "but", please? I've had a legal name change, so let's do that, just as if I were anybody else.

(pause)

Help a sister out?

Thankfully, she laughed a little. So she finally got it, said she'd be getting it into process, so I hope we're good there.

I guess if I wanted to be smelly about it, I could make a case for sex discrimination. There was a service I needed, that I was entitled to, and I was requesting that it be performed. But I was getting pushback, and the only reason for it was my gender. Had I not been able to persuade her, I would suffer material damages, starting with the $500 prescriptions.

But mostly I'm glad it's over.

UPDATE! While I was typing this, I got a call from my new best friend. And she needed to have the stuff explained to her all over again.

Sigh.