Mar
4
¿Cuál es tu apellido?
Ha,ha. Check out this funny video “Ya fui Hussein, ahora quiero ser Vazquez” from Martin Varsavsky. He’s originally from Argentina but he has Spanish citizenship. In this video he rags on Iberia, Spain’s horrible international airline, for constantly misspelling his last name. I can totally relate to this complaint. It seems that in Spain if you don’t have dos apellidos or if you have a name that falls outside the sphere of the traditional, dime-a-dozen José María, María Jesús, etc., it’s almost a given that your name will be changed, mangled or just frequently misspelled at some point. (Una chapuza = a shoddy piece of work)
OMG! He gave out his credit card number to all of us!
Edwin,
Yes, some of Martin Varsavsky’s readers picked up on that as well and commented about that on his blog. But I think because his last name is terribly misspelled on all SEVEN of the credit cards he’s received from Iberia, I’m pretty sure whatever digits we might see are invalid (i.e. closed) accounts. Varsavsky is a multi-millionaire so I’m sure he’s only letting us see what he wants us to see.
Yeah, tell me about it!
In Iberia’s and Spain’s defense, low level corporate drones in other countries aren’t much better with foreign names. Iberia sending his information to a dozen credit card companies is definitely shameful, though.
It’s even worse he makes fun of the standard Castillian accent :’(.
@ Erik:
Yeah, I know you’re right about this not just being a Spain thing. I’m used to people misspelling my first and last names. There was one time, back in the States, where somebody needed to mail me some info and I spelled my name out TWICE to the lady, letter by letter, over the phone. The envelope I got was addressed to an ALLANA D’ALESSIO
What killed me was the apostrophe. Who adds an apostrophe to somebody else’s name? I figure the lady who sent the package knew someone by that D’Alessio name and just wrote down a name that was familiar to her.
@ Ramses:
I don’t know Varsavsky personally but I’m pretty sure he’s poking fun at the Castillian accent since some Spaniards find it “cursi” the way some South Americans speak Spanish. His blog frequently pokes fun at or criticizes things in Spanish society/Spanish culture that annoy or exasperate him. In a way it’s kind of cool that he has this perspective because he’s probably one of the wealthiest men in Spain, so you would think he’d be one of the ultimate insiders, but instead he writes about his life as though he were a foreigner living in Spain.
With the way identity theft is here in the states, its hard to believe people can do that. But regardless, these companies have such controls and insurance, I’m sure he isn’t worried.