Just a Formality

On Friday I worked with Tony, Jon, Chris, Debbie, Oli, Ronnie, Matt, Mike and Andy.

This morning I find I'm working with Anthony, Jonathan, Christopher, Deborah, Oliver, Ronald, Matthew, Michael and Andrew.

A rather unforeseen side effect of our company's switch of email systems, has been the reformalisation of our names in the address book.

One of my colleagues, Dave (or David as of today), is delighted that he has been vindicated in his long standing habit of calling me E1iz@beth.

Suddenly, it's not just him and "my mother when I'm in trouble".

Whilst this has introduced a humourous formality to our day, it's caused more of a problem with the suprisingly high number of my colleagues who use their middle names instead of their first names.

To email those folks you have to remember that D@n is really Edw@rd, Deni_s is really Jo_hn, Alu_n is really Willi@m, Gl@dwin is really John, and so forth.

It's a weirdly common practice in this office, which bears little correlation with common sense or expectation. A former colleague, just a few years older than myself, went by his middle name of Granv1lle in preference to his first name of Rich@rd. Whilst, Ronnie you would think had more cause than most to put distance between his first and last name; his surname being M@cDonald...

Mind you, you have to have some sympathy, for the first 30 years of his life it wouldn't have had the burger selling clown connoctations, which some have opined removes his parents from blame. I'm not so sure; after all, it was always a rhyming name and that's never a good idea is it?