Spelling Exposure

It was an awkward enough text message to beginning with. He is a good friend of mine and one of the most honest and amiable people I know. Yet, it seems like the only time we ever speak is when it is about money or business. In this case it was both. He works in the Student Services Center at the American University in Cairo, and he is sort of my boss. Last semester he got me a job as an AUC tour guide.

Being a tour guide is a good job. It doesn’t take up too much time. There is essentially no collateral work, and at a campus that is half finished it is actually a bit of a challenge. And the pay is good. I get about $18 for a one hour tour. I also think I am a good tour guide. I speak loudly. I am enthusiastic about many of the architectural and academic intricacies of my school, and when the Egyptian high school students behave like third graders I do not rip their arms off and use the bloody appendages to shackle their wandering legs. However, I do go back and forth between trying to drive kids away because I don’t want them at my school, and, if I like them, trying to drive kids away because I don’t want them to be disappointed. But this is not what made the text awkward.

It was an awkward text message partly because, self-conscious about seeming like a jerk, I did my best to make the message sound unnecessarily nonchalant, and at the end I tacked on an out of place “let’s hang out sometime here.” It was a sincere exclamation, but its chief purpose was to sandwich the actual business content of the message. The top bun of the sandwich was the cheery opening “Hey Guindy!” And that was where the real problem began.

It was a problem because “Guindy” wasn’t exactly his name. I noticed this just as I hit “send” on the key pad.

If spelled phonetically it might be “Gindy,” but I didn’t think wasn’t right. I had typed in a series of keys and then hit the button that cycles through possible combinations. The printing had long since worn off my phone—no I not one of those people; it is a used phone that I got from a friend and the buttons were already quite faded—so I did not know exactly which letters I had hit. When the phone came offered my Guindy—capitalized no less—I deferred to its authority. But as soon as I sent the message I realized this spelling made little sense.

It is hard to express the level of angst that this predicament caused me. I realized how foolish I looked for misspelling his name, but I would look obsessive compulsive if I wrote him back just to say that I realized the mistake. And come to think of it, I still wasn’t exactly clear on the correct spelling. Dina, sitting next to me and navigating in and out of Ring Road traffic, thought it was “Gendy” and laughed at me for being so concerned. So naturally, I didn’t mention that my question to her was just the tip of the iceberg. What if he actually thought, that I though, that this was how he spelled his name? Then he would be put in the awkward position of having to correct me. What if he thought I didn’t know how to pronounce his name? I reassured myself that he had heard me say it correctly on multiple occasions. Worst of all, what if he just shrugged it off with the old “Well, he’s American. He doesn’t know any better.” The questions were endless.

The simple answer was either write him and correct myself—“*Opps, I meant Gendy”—or buck up and wait until the occasion where he brought up that I had been misspelling his name… but I am something of a social coward. Give me precipice between two buildings, and I’ll jump it. Give me a country flirting with civil unrest , and I am there. But give me an introduction between a good friend and an acquaintance I have known for years, and I will urgently need to use the bathroom, leaving the two to introduce themselves. If there is no bathroom present I might go into a coughing fit, holding my left hand over my mouth and gesturing with the right from one to the other as if it say “It’s OK, go ahead without me.” This is easier than admitting that I don’t remember either of their names. Give me anything with the subject of farting, and I don’t even know where to start. I am not even comfortable with the terminology. In middle school if I had ever broken wind loudly in class I would have had to drop out of school. If I had just transferred to a new district the shame might have followed me.

Once I was at a hotel swimming pool with some friends and one of my buddies came over and squatted down on the lip of the pool. Like usual most of us had forgotten our swimming trunks, and my friend was in his boxers. He was asking about something, maybe the room key or temperature of the pool, and only a couple seconds went by before awareness swept through everyone like a wave. His testicles were showing. Squatting on the side of the pool his boxers had snuck up his thigh, and now both his balls hung like a pair of cherries out of the left leg opening, dark, hairy and shriveled looking. And all of us were bobbing around at just about ball height.

I would have died.

Instead, he burst out laughing, along with everybody else, readjusted his boxers, and dove into the pool. I have never told him that I look up to him for taking this public exposure like a champ. That would just make me feel more pathetic.

It isn’t that I am afraid of people or crowds; I get along well with both. It is just that I have a lot of paranoid phobias relating to social situations. One of these phobias is spelling. I don’t fear my spelling itself. It is quite benign, sitting at home in a box. I fear people finding out about it. In grade school I perfected the art of the “vaeiouwaeioul” one character just jumbled and ambiguous enough that to the liberal mind it could look like any vowel in the book. Often when I am hand writing a “quick spontaneous note” I will type it up first, just to make sure I don’t do something stupid. When my family finally got around to buying a computer—which had spell check—it was like being liberated from a cage of anxiety and evasion.

Names are an especially sour spot. Names need have no official spelling. The same pronunciation might be Katherine or Catherine, or someone could decide to spell it Kathorynne just to be avant-garde. There are names that are one way for boys and another for girls like Aaron and Erin. And then there are the deviations, like someone deciding to be novel and spell “Hannah” without the second “h” or Julie with a double “e.” What is that all about, and how are you supposed to know? People say things like, “Well is it German or the Russian?” Common people, my spelling is bad enough as it is; don’t burden me with geography as well. Name spellings become even more difficult when transliterated from a foreign script like Arabic.

And of course names aren’t just tricky, they are also personal. No one gets given the cold shoulder for misspelling “volcanoes,” but try throwing an “ie” into “Charlene” after 3 months of dating and you will be lucky if you still get a shoulder, cold or otherwise.

My heart goes out to grandparents.

Starring at the screen on my bulky, old, gray Nokia, I suddenly had an idea. I couldn’t apologize for misspelling his name. That would be ridiculous. And I couldn’t do nothing or he might think any number of things. But, I could make him think it had been a simple slip of the thumb. I quickly brainstormed a new issue to write him about.

I eventually composed, “oh gendy, ill also get you my schedule when i get home so you know when i am free.” Feeling satisfied with myself for alleviating my guilt I hit “send.”  The animation of a letter being thrown across the screen popped up and the “sending…” meter slowly filled.  When it gave the “Message Sent” signal I hit back, to the message, and then back again.  There in my address book, right after “Garf” and right before “Gillian Knox” it said “Gendi” with an “i.” The seeds of doubt and unease blossomed anew.