Over the years my name has suffered some butchering. People have called me things like Bernie, Berry, Veronica, Vero, and even Blanca lol. I remember at some point I stopped fighting it and just went with the flow. It began with an old company where I used to work in the “Spanish Team”. I’m bilingual and so that was handy to the company, they could switch me back and forth depending how busy our workload was for the day. The Spanish speakers called me Bere pronounced [bé-re] with a slight roll on the “r”. But to non-Spanish speakers this sounded like Betty, not realizing what I was being called was a short version of Berenice. Sort of like how you would shorten Samantha as Sam. My name works the same way. Eventually because of the recession this location shut down, and I was lucky enough to have been offered another position somewhere else. Unexpectedly the person that hired me introduced me as Betty to everyone. Soon everyone there knew me as BETTY the “negotiator” (because of my job position). In addition to my work calendar, my desktop, usernames, and passwords all began with BETTY. Betty here, Betty there, Betty everywhere! Even my clients began calling me Betty and many of them never found out about my “real” name. In fact, a lot of my clients felt closer to me because I reminded them of their aunt Betty or their cousin Betty.
See, I have to constantly explain the pronunciation of my name and most of the time I say it's the same as Bernice, but it's just so that I don't have to explain or say it over again the way I prefer. At some point my name was replaced temporarily with Bere, then mistaken for Betty, and it made me chuckled (shaking my head side to side). Life’s too short to be serious all the time. Current people I know that still call me Betty get creative by greeting me as Betty Boop! Whenever I get greeted like this it flashes me back to those working days, it just makes me smile. Betty will always have meaning to me simply because of the dear people that follow that name. Either way my name is Berenice and I pronounce it:
be (pronounce the "e" the same way as in bet)
re (sounds kind of like the "ra" in raven with a soft "r")
ni (same as knee)
ce (sounds similar to "sa" in safe)
Spell checker suggested I change my name to Bernice, but I chose to ignore.
Be-re-ni-ce is how I like to say it!