A co-worker of mine said to another co-worker, “Sorry I called you Jean yesterday,” to which the other replied, “Don’t worry, it happens all the time.”

I wonder if she meant that people often call her by the wrong name, or if people often mistake her for a person named Jean.

Anyway, have you ever seen the episode of Seinfeld where Peggy, Elaine’s co-worker, calls her Susie? And because Elaine misses her chance to correct her, she starts responding as if her name were Susie.

Think it can’t happen? When I was in college, I worked at an italian restaurant as a dishwasher. One of the cooks called me TJ. I wasn’t sure if I heard him right or if he was even talking to me, so I said nothing.

By the time I figured out that he was, in fact, calling me TJ, too much time had passed (nearly two weeks) for me to correct him. So, I started responding to TJ.

“Hey TJ, can you grab me some spaghetti sauce on your way back up?” he would say, and I would respond. Strangely enough, no one ever noticed — or at least thought enough to consider correcting him or asking me why I didn’t correct him. They also would call me Mike, not TJ, even though this guy did, which makes even less sense.

At one point, he had been referring to me as TJ for so long that I was trying to think of reasons I could possibly go by the nickname TJ.

One night at a party he asked me if my name was Mike. Then he asked why I let him call me TJ for almost a year. I told him it was because I missed the opportunity to correct it. And, as more time passed it would have been harder to explain why I didn’t correct him, which, strangely enough, he said made sense to him.

Honestly, I would have let him believe my name was TJ for the rest of our lives. But, since he figured it out, I had no choice but to tell him the truth. We did have a good laugh about the whole thing, though.