You have heard of Charles Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities. “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” I must tell you my tale of two names. In my case, the worst of times applies. My mother gave me a first name that has haunted me most of my life: Gösta. She had seen a movie just before I was born, The Saga of Gösta Berling, a novel by Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for her first novel, published in 1891. It tells the story of a defrocked Lutheran priest who became an alcoholic, but he was redeemed by a woman. It was made into a silent film in 1924, starring Greta Garbo as the redeemer and Lars Hanson as Gösta Berling. Why my mother would name me after an alcoholic priest is beyond me. I had never seen the movie until recently. Being named after a main character, I decided to watch the movie.  It was long and silent, with subtitles, but now I understood the whole story. So, I never asked my mother why she chose the name of a defrocked, drunken priest. But it’s been the worst of times for me because of that name.

I always have to spell it when I call on the phone, and when I was younger, during roll call at school, the teacher always hesitated before calling out my name. You may notice that it has an umlaut ‘ö’ in it. English doesn’t have umlauts, which German uses for every vowel. When we immigrated to the USA, and I applied for my Social Security card around age 18, they told me they couldn’t include the umlaut. The accepted substitute in English is to use “oe” instead. So I became Goesta. That was worse than the umlaut—often misspelled and mistaken for a girl’s name because of the “a” ending. To simplify, I just dropped the ‘e’ and went by Gosta, and my driver’s license listed my name as Gosta. That turned out to be a mistake, as Social Security now has me listed as Goesta, cast in stone.

Recently, Social Security sent me an email prompting me to check my account due to suspicious irregularities. Using ID.me and Login.gov, I couldn’t access my Social Security account no matter what I did. It took weeks and numerous calls to figure out the problem. Sometimes, wait times exceeded an hour. I got tired of the elevator music they played while waiting for a live person. If I requested a callback, they never called back. The online help was totally useless. Turned out, the first names they had on file didn’t match my driver’s license, which has listed Gosta for over sixty years. Once again, the umlaut ”ö” was the problem. I argued that, grammatically, it’s now acceptable to substitute ‘oe’ or just ‘o’ for ‘ö’ as used in Wikipedia and Grammarly. When you read German names like Göring or Lagerlöf, you can use ‘oe’ or just ‘o ’. But the Social Security Administration doesn’t have to follow accepted grammar rules. The verdict was I needed the DMV to change my name back to Goesta, as SSA had it indelibly recorded that way.

As you all know, the California DMV isn’t an easy agency to deal with. They claimed they based the spelling on my U.S. passport. But I’ve had a driver’s license since I was 16, long before I had a passport, so that claim doesn’t hold water. Now I need to change my passport first. Another long wait in line! Once I get the new passport, the DMV can change my name. My new driver’s license should arrive in four to six weeks, which will enable SSA to identify me properly.  I just hope those irregularities they mentioned don’t deplete my Social Security account before I get everything sorted out.