Are you Professor Finnegan?

It happened again this morning. I got the question. Here's the standard scenario: A stranger knocks on my office door, the door on which is painted (really, in the old-fashioned way, painted) my name: C. A. Finnegan. I say, "Come in." I am in C. A. Finnegan's office. Sitting at C. A. Finnegan's computer. Doing C. A. Finnegan's work. Yet despite all of these obvious cues the perplexed stranger insists on asking, "Are you Professor Finnegan?" Sometimes the stranger's inflection is neutral, the question serving as an odd sort of conversation starter. But sometimes it's the "you" that's emphasized, as in, "Are YOU Professor Finnegan?" And, on more than a few occasions, I've gotten an entirely different, even more irritating, version: "Can you tell me when Professor Finnegan will be in?"

So I ask, dear readers (if indeed I have any), what exactly is it about the sight of me working in my office behind a door with my name on it that leads people to believe that I am not me?

Comments

[Ken]

Is it because, perhaps, people are not expecting a tenured college professor to be a hot blond chick? And I use that phrase in its most respectful sense.

[dhawhee]

I agree with "Ken." And at least they have a clue who you're supposed to be. The most frequent question I get on the other side of Lincoln Hall, where D. Hawhee is stenciled to the door, is "you got a stapler?"

[caraf]

I get that question too. I usually respond, "Yeah, if you got twenty bucks."

[Loralee]

It's because you are a woman who could easily qualify for early 30s, and not some wrinkled, bitter fogie. Not that they are in any way affected by the sexism in acadamia/society in general.