bridget jones was based on a real person

Oh. MY God.  

I've been unforgivably dumb. It's bad. It's really really bad.

I've been working with this lady from another organisation on a campaign we are doing together. (Incidentally, it's the project which has me heading out to some rural hamlet every week, in North Devon or Wiltshire like last Friday).

We've been working on the campaign for the last, oh, five months.

We've sent each other emails, chatted on the phone, met up for meetings in person, she's even dropped me off somewhere in her car. I am in touch with her perhaps four times a day on average.

All was fine until yesterday when there was a photo of her that needed to be captioned.

I was thinking, 'Hmmmm, I don't know her surname after all this time. How funny. I'd better look it up!"

So I trawl through my mails, and ask my colleague who is also working on this thing, "What's her surname dude?"

She looks for it in her mails too, and nothing. Cataclysmic collision of nerve endings occur in my head. Oh mother of all things good and true. It's not a double-barrelled name. It's a name and a surname. Two separate things.

I've been calling this woman by her NAME & SURNAME for about SIXTEEN WEEKS. IN EVERY WHICH SITUATION YOU COULD POSSIBLY IMAGINE.

Meanwhile, my colleague hasn't. While she thought her name was also a double-barrel, she shortened it. I didn't. I thought, "I'm going to make a real effort to call her by her full name, because I bet no-one else does. I'll bet people get lazy and just shorten it. So I'm going to make a REAL EFFORT here to use her full name, as her mother intended."

Well. What a dick. Imagine for a sec that I was doing it to your name.

"Hey Kate-Smith, would you like some tea?" "Dear Kate-Smith, how are you?" "Are you OK to tally up the numbers for the event Kate-Smith?"

And most recently: "Thanks so much Kate-Smith for for the lift, see you soon."

I have seen one name similar to hers before, so in my defense, it's not totally out of the question. But SHE DIDN'T CORRECT ME.

Going back through the emails, of course only now I see that she actually signs all her mails with her 'shortened' name. And even more mortifyingly, as time went on, she added a fucking signature to all her correspondence. "Name, Surname, Title, Phone Number."

She must think one of two things. That I'm a little bit special and/or that in South Africa it's customary to call people by their names and surnames for absolutely everything - even when asking if they want a cup of tea - as it's polite. Or that my company hired me as their special Retarded Person.

She obviously passed the threshold of telling me that this is in fact not her name, maybe after the third time I said it. Now that it's been about five months, she's come to accept that I call her by her double full name. All the time. Everywhere.

I have to see her Friday. Either I'll just start calling EVERYONE around me by their full names, or I'll have to come clean. And admit that I've been really really thick. 

PS: Why does this stuff always happen to me? No one else, unless they are literally not all there, has this happen to them. 

PPS: Can't work out why this post is corrupted. After 8000 fiddles. Fuck it. Fuck everything.