"What's your name?" he asked me.
Now I could have been mean and said "It's written on that credit card right in front of you", but instead I chose simply to tell him.
"It's Bartle", I said. "B A R". I paused; he wrote B A R; he paused. "T L E". I paused; he wrote, well, see for yourself:
I'm pretty sure I didn't say, "T O H", but that's what he wrote.
This happens all the time: people can get the B A R right, but when it comes to the T L E they recover what they have in their head from having heard me say "Bartle" and they write that down instead of what I tell them. What's particularly odd is that even though I say my name in my own accent, which is very clear on the presence of letters like T, they store it in their brains in their own accent; then, when it comes to writing it down, it emerges as BARTOO, BARTEL, BARDLE — all kinds of weird stuff.
I could probably say "B A R M A N" and they'd still write BARTIL or whatever...