Wendy killed my nickname

I'm not bitter about it, but I've really only had one decent nickname in my life and I liked it a lot, and Wendy quite inadvertantly killed it off. (Marty, as a shortened form of Martin, doesn't count because they're practically the same thing.)

When I joined the army at the age of 18, my fellow soldiers gave me the nickname Scotty because of my Scottish accent. I quite liked that and soon started referring to myself as Scotty. You just sort of do that without thinking about it. You get used to being known by the nickname and it comes out automatically whenever you meet someone. I became so used to it that being called by my real name seemed strange, almost wrong. Of course my family still used my real name, but they lived interstate and by the time I left the Army, all of my friends and colleagues knew me as Scotty. Most of my friends didn’t even know my real name.

After I left the Army I moved back to my home state and started attending university. I was still calling myself Scotty and all my classmates knew me as such. One of my classmates introduced me to a friend of hers called Wendy. My classmate thought that Wendy and I would make a good couple, but we didn’t really hit it off in that way. We became friends though and had lunch together every Tuesday. Wendy has a personal policy of never using nicknames. I suspect that is because you can’t make anything out of Wendy, but I don’t know for sure. Anyway, my classmate introduced me as Scotty, but Wendy started calling me Scott, thinking that must be my real name. I said “I'm not Scott, I'm Scotty.” She said “I don’t use nicknames.” and I said “Well my real name isn’t Scott, it’s Marty.” So Wendy calls me Martin. Shortly after that, Wendy introduced me, as Martin, to her friend, Debbie, who later became my wife. So Debbie and her family have always called me Martin.

Now Scotty is dead and Wendy has moved to Tasmania.