One of the problems with moving your company to Zoom is that you rapidly lose track of your coworkers’ lives. Wait, they got married? Who’s having a baby? I haven’t heard from so and so in weeks, apparently they left the company!
Such was the case when a new coworker was introduced (via Slack) whose last name was McBeth. “Oh my,” I thought, “I simply must introduce myself.” But how? I won’t bump into her in the halls. We’ll have no meetings together. Is it weird to send her a Slack message making Shakespeare references? It’s not like she’ll ever walk by my desk and see that it’s littered with Shakespeare memorabilia.
Turns out I didn’t have to. We have a company meeting every other week, and this week they broke up into smaller chats (“breakout rooms”) to get more social, and sure enough McBeth was in mine. After she’d introduced herself along with the others in the room I had to ask. “So do you get many Shakespeare references?” I ask.
She smiles, rolls her eyes and says, “You have no idea. It’s not spelled the same, so every time I have to read my name out, like over the phone with a credit card, or oh god, at a cash register or something when they see it, they always say Oh, Macbeth, like in Shakespeare!’
“My god think of all the people you’ve killed by saying the name!” I tell her. “As you might have noticed, I have a certain affinity for Shakespeare.”
“Oh, they told me about you,” she replied.
Apparently my reputation precedes me 🙂