Lewalan? what!?

Someone handed me their debit card today to look up their account and I literally could not say their name. My brain didn't know how to read it, was it: le-wall-en? la- waa-lan? lelalynn?
I couldn't figure it out, and for some strange reason unbeknown to myself I was reading it out loud, to myself, over and over again trying to figure it out. I literally butchered the name and had to ask the customer, "how do you say your name?" (It's not unusual for me to not know how to say someone's name at work, because we have lots of people with Hawaiian names, Japanese names etc etc etc. But this name was different because it felt like an name I should know how to read, but every time I tried it sounded like gibberish). He, yes HE, was very cool about the fact that I literally spoke another language when I tried to read his name and had a couple of funny jokes up his sleeve about it. He said he was used to having a name no one could read and that a lot of people got beat up because of it in elementary school, but that he's learned to let it go.
He told me the story of how his unusual name came to be, and I'm going to tell you. His parents couldn't agree on a name, one wanted Lew (as in Lou) and the other wanted Alan. So instead of arguing about it they came up with a compromise: Lew-alan, which is much easier for my brain to read. Lew-alan didn't like the hyphen so he took it out and his name became Lewalan. I think both names are quite lovely myself (no I don't), but if I were to go through the process of having my name changed to take out a hyphen I believe I would have changed my entire name. He said that his parents cursed him for the rest of his life for naming him that, and I would have to agree.