Kerryn Goldsworthy has a post on her blog entitled ‘Don’t call me Mrs‘. It’s an issue which annoys the life out of me. Her post is primarily about telemarketers etc. getting it wrong but what really bothers me is not so much telemarketers who make assumptions but doctors and nurses who do so.
For example, walk in to for a gynaecological exam. and find that you’re automatically addressed as Mrs. and if you happen to correct whoever’s talking to you, you’ll find that you simply won’t get the tests you need done because it quite simply doesn’t occur to the idiots that one does not need to be married to be in an intimate relationship. And if you do happen to say that you are despite not being married, God help you if you don’t have very thick skin.
I hadn’t realised how annoying it could be till my former doctor in England sent me a letter (followed up by another one six months later) asking me to get some tests done just so that I would have some base figures to check against ones in the future if need be. I quite simply didn’t manage to get the tests done though because every doctor I went to came up with some variation of ‘but we generally don’t do any tests for unmarried girls’. (I still look like a school-child.)
I don’t know if the unwillingness had something to do with virginity or if it was quite simply downright stupidity. Either way, it left me fuming. At one point, I thought of claiming that I was married but, by then, I was so angry that I don’t think I would have been able to pull it off.
Telemarketers, however, have not been too much of a problem for me: almost all such calls are from banks and not one of them has any desire to touch a lawyer, would-be-lawyer or anyone else who is even remotely associated with the legal system with a bargepole.
Links:
[1] http://pavlovblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/dont-call-me-mrs.html
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