What's in a name...

I had lunch with another Jo on Friday. A Jo who I have been friends with for over 30 years. We met when we worked together at Red Rooster. Since then our lives have taken similar and different turns...husbands, kids, homes and work. So now we keep in touch via texts and see each other occasionally. Yesterday we hadn't had a face to face catch up for about 18 months and during a long lunch we  talked and talked and got up to speed. It has always been that way, we can have long intervals between visits but it's as if no time has passed by at all.

I have met and worked with a lot of Jos in my time. It seems to be a very common name, shortened from quite a few other longer names. When I was a teenager Jos' step children called me JoJo. Shortening Jo-Anne to JoJo is a very intimate gesture to me, and very few do it.  Nearly every one calls me Jo except now for a few family members and it depends on my mood if I introduce myself as Jo or Jo-Anne. Some people assume because my name is hyphenated that my name is Jo with a middle name of Anne. Most people go ahead and shorten it anyway. I have a couple of (older) patients who insist on calling me Jo-Anne even though I am always Jo at work. My mother hated the shortened form for me or any of her offspring and Australians cant leave a name alone, its always shortened or lengthened or changed altogether! My mother told me that she wanted to name me Babette but my father baulked at that idea and my name was a compromise from his offering of Joanna.

I'm pretty interchangable on the whole thing and dont mind either way. I do get tired of having spell out the hyphen and have registrations with companies reward programs in a few different configurations. That gets a bit tricky if you dont have their card on you and they look for it in their data bases.

Maybe I should just be Jo in that case, it's a bit hard to misspell that but anything is possible eh?