Quandary

So here I am in Europe, living in a place where I thought, at long last, my name would finally cease to be massacred on a daily basis.

Alas, no dice.

First of all, my full name (Jeanne Therese, which is French) is almost never used here. People tend to drop their second names and have just one first name and one surname in almost all their official correspondence. So here I am simply Jeanne. Jeanne Andres, with the accent on the first syllable of my surname, to boot. That's fine with me; that's how B now says his surname and that's how I introduce myself to people. OHN-dres, not And-RES.

My only trouble with "Jeanne" is, (1) I have never responded to being called Jeanne, and (2), most people here pronounce it as JEAN, which is the English pronounciation of the name, instead of ZHAN. I have always cringed inwardly whenever I'd hear my name mispronounced, and it's been something I've lived with all my life in the Philippines.

Second, being a Filipino, I have a nickname, and that nickname is simply Nette, pronounced NET. So to Pinoy friends and community brethren here, I am Nette, but I have found that many times, too often, English people seem to have a problem calling me by my nickname. I have heard myself called Nettie dozens of times; apparently there is a European language (Dutch?) in which Nette is pronounced as NETTEE. Others seem to struggle with NET, finding it too abrupt, and I see them constantly doing a double take, as if training their tongues to say such a curt name, saying "Aaah... Nette (with the T sound elongated slightly, as if to make up for the missing vowel sound they seemed to think was lacking)... would you like to have a cup of tea?" Perhaps it's a linguistic thing. Pinoys have always preferred my nickname to my real name, and I am used to hearing my nickname said with a Filipino "caress," like a "paglalambing" or tone of affection. Here, that's a thing of the past.

My driving instructor, Jill, after thirty hours on the road with me, finally felt comfortable enough to ask me about my nickname last weekend.

"So why are you called Nette?"

"Because my full name is Jeanne Therese, which was shortened to Jeannette, which eventually became Nette... Why? People here seem to have a problem with it, I notice."

"Yeah, yeah," she said. "Only, I think, because it doesn't really SOUND like a NAME, you see... It sounds more like a fish net or a hair net or a...a..."

"Like the internet," I supplied.

"Yeah, yeah, exactly."

That got me thinking. Right now, I'm applying for part time jobs, and I need to decide what professional name I should be called at interviews and later on, at work. Maybe I should stop forcing people to go through the discomfort of saying NETTE. Maybe I should keep going by JEANNE ANDRES and just steel myself to get used to it, whether it's said ZHAN or JEAN. Or maybe I should ask friends or future colleagues to call me JEANNETTE? Since it has a "nette" at the end, I figure I'd respond to it more than I would to "Jeanne." Is this pretentious? Am I about to join the league of Filipino migrants who have changed and Westernised their names along with their country of residence? When Totoy becomes Toto, Ging becomes Jen, and so on.

What say you?