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What’s in a name? So fellow reporter (and associate producer extraordinaire on AM drive) Mary Richards and I were comparing notes about the e-mails we get today, and realized that we have something in common. I’d long thought I got e-mails addressed to men because my last name is also some people’s first name – Bruce. I get mail addressed to “Mr. Bruce.” (And just to clarify, Mr. Bruce is my father.) I get mail addressed to just plain “Dear Bruce.” I get mail addressed to “Dear Mr. Bruce.” And so on. Until today, I’d just assumed that was because Bruce can be a first or a last name. But Mary says it happens to her, too. “Dear Mr. Richards.” Not so much “Dear Richard,” though. We can’t figure it out. It’s not just spam mail. Sometimes it’s e-mail from someone who’s clearly read a story on KSL.com that we wrote, and clicked on the e-mail address at the bottom of the article to send us a note. Sure, my e-mail address is just my first initial and my last name, but up at the top of the story, it really says “By Becky Bruce.” And I don’t know any fellas named Becky, do you? Or Mary, for that matter. To a certain extent, we get it. Both of us have, at one time or another, worked in very male-dominated environments. It’s not that way anymore. But it seems like it took a lot longer for the newsroom world to catch up to the reality of the broader workplace when it came to parity among the sexes. We just would have thought by now, you wouldn’t assume a generic e-mail address belongs to a man. I think what we’ve come to realize is that people really don’t pay attention to each other the way they used to. It’s not just e-mail. It’s the face-to-face conversations you have when you realize the other person wasn’t listening so much as waiting for you to pause for breath so they can interject their point. It’s the vague “mm-hmm” you get in response when you realize your spouse wasn’t really listening. (I’m totally guilty of that one. Sorry, honey!) It’s the “Wait… what?” you get when someone realizes they completely missed the last part of what you said while they were checking a text message. Are we too easily distracted? I know I probably am. By the way, if you’re not *too* busy, you can follow “Mr. Richards” and “Mr. Bruce” on twitter – just click on the links.
