My preferred name is Jennifer Hannah

How fussy are you about people addressing you with your desired name? I have noticed that people who have an unusual or hard to pronounce name talk about how this has impacted their identity and become a defining part of their character. I empathise with them! Whilst my name wasn't hard to pronounce or unusual, the fact that my maiden name was more widely recognised as a first name was a topic of much fascination. There were the people who just double barrelled it and called me Jennie-Hannah. There were the people who were intrigued and amused by it, and enjoyed its rhyming potential, most notably Jennifer Spanner. When emails came along there was a short while where it was stylish (especially with business emails) to lead with surname followed by the initial of your first name. That is when I just stared responding to Hannah and got used to people calling me by all kinds of variations of my name.

For all the reasons listed above I have welcomed all of my nicknames because more than anything else, they are unique to me.

I read somewhere that the high proportion of business directors called Dave has a lot of root causes. One contributing factor is that Dave is easy to remember and easy to pronounce which leads Daves' to have a quicker social acceptance than others. I guess the occasional typo addressing Dave as your Fave is not going to cause any offence either. It might even strengthen your relationship.

I enjoy how passionate people are about naming conventions. I love the names Meadow and Summer and enjoy how this irks some people. I know how hard it is to name a child and get the balance right between a reasonably unique name, constant misspelling and its rhyming potential. Despite my experience being called 'Spanner', I have given my kids names where the shortened versions rhyme with the name of a sex toy and a deadly disease. I tell them it is character building but really I feel their frustration.

In data-science, naming conventions can cause much confusion. Here is an example, you work in retail and want to tally up all the items that are associated with Christmas but half the business have used a Christmas labelling tag and half of them have used Xmas label. Then someone or even a team of people have the tedious job of adding together two distinct lists. There are classification databases where you can use AIs but experience has proved to me that this is a long winded, expensive, headache-inducing route compared to say just asking the team to stick to a naming convention approved by company. Labelling stuff is important for the management of things, that critical data is used for a whole host of analytical and operational purposes and the allocation of resources.

AI as a descriptive name irks me. I'd like to call it CAT short for computer accelerated thinking. I love computers and their processing powers and their ability to find patterns that people can't but sometime our use of AI is lazy and adds to the feeling that computers make things more impersonable.

Recently my healthcare has come under wider hospital care teams. Dear Jennifer HANNAH, comes through the letter box and I know its correspondence from St Marys Hospital.

Due to recent visits I know that the new(ish) database in the NHS has a number of 'name' options. There is your legal name and also your preferred name. For me, an AI has inputted HANNAH as my preferred name. All in capitals too which makes me smile because the upper case really emphases the palindrome beauty of it. After years of getting used to its misuse and abuse I do actually feel joy seeing it again on the doorstep.

My mother-in-law is having a wholly different experience, her preferred name is her middle name. Unfortunately this is not in the database and she is greeted by her 'legal first name' by every new person that she meets in the NHS.

It seems only the people on reception are good at updating your name records in the new NHS system, so if you find yourself on the ward in an emergency, good luck with the care team getting your preferred name right first time. Lets hope the rest of our data is in good order.

Hannah lives on. Even if it is only in the NHS system where my preferred name is Jennifer HANNAH.

Jenny x