What a surprise. If you google my name, I came in as the fourth result!

I am happy, I am famous! I show up in Google!

I guess this is one of the advantages of having an infrequent name (outside of the Basque country at least), I have a great Google rank and I am easily findable.

On the downside, I get all this impossible pronunciations of my name all the time: PA-TS-KEE, PA-TSEE, and so many others. My classmates at the school even make fun out of it, and my study group members collect all the different variations I have collected over the classes and projects.

But hey, at least they are trying! Because then there is the (in)formal conversations where my name is magically changed to that of the patron saint of Ireland:

XYZ: Hi, I’m XYZ!
PTX: Hi XYZ, my name is Patxi! (pronounced deliberately slowly)
XYZ: PATRICK, great meeting you.
PTX: Er…(should I correct her/him or not?) … (calculating probabilities of talking ever again with XYZ vs cost and awkwardness of moment and spelling P-A-T-X-I pronounced as P AH CHE as in cheese)…

You can imagine, it happens every day. And, for those of you wondering, Patxi and Patrick have nothing to do, opposite to Francisco, Francesco and Frank.To sum up, I rank high on Google (which is good) at the price of being mispronounced by most native English speakers. Well, 1 billion potential readers finding me vs 380 million native speakers misprononcing… Not a bad trade-off.