As my username implies, I’m involved with the HR Department at work. Part of the more occasional administrative duties I do is processing Change of Details forms when people notify us of moving house, changing phone numbers, etc.
A few months ago a form was dropped off in our Out of Hours box with a Change of Address. Unfortunately, it was filled out poorly. The form only had the first name (Let’s say the name was Tom) of the employee and the new address. The form itself asks for Employee number, First & Last name and the Old & New address to make sure we’re updating the correct records.
Since the company I work for is a large one, just under 2,000 employees this is obviously not enough information to even know who dropped the form off. I checked our records and saw that we had eight current employees with that first name. Since the old address wasn’t specified I couldn’t even look up the addresses for those eight to figure out which one it was. Given my workload, I didn’t really have the capacity to go as far as checking the physical personnell files in the hope of comparing the handwriting, so I just set the form to the side and continued with more pressing work, like invoices. Eventually I decided to just keep the form in a folder on my desk so that if it was ever queried I had the evidence to show I couldn’t do anything with it.
About a month ago we did a mailout to certain staff to confirm and advise of some wage increases. As you may have guessed, our friend Tom was one of those affected. After he didn’t receive his letter, he came by the HR Office to complain.
$Tom: I never got the letter about my wage increase! What the hell?! I’m entitled to this! I want my increase! <rabble rabble rabble>
$Aech: Calm down, Tom. You definitely have a letter, I mail-merged them myself. I’ll do a reprint for you right now, if you like.
$Tom: Yeah, that’d be good
$Aech: *prints off another copy of his letter and hands it to him*
$Tom: Well that explains a lot, you lot never processed my change of address!
$Aech: (*Internal Ah-Ha! moment as I remember the Change of Address without any useful information*) Ohh, did you mean this one? (*I get it from my folder and show it to him*)
$Tom: Yeah, that’s the one! Why the hell haven’t you done anything with it?!
$Aech: Well, you’ve only put your first name here. We’ve got about eight Toms total, and there was no old address to be able to compare it to…
$Tom: Well someone should have told me!
$Aech: … How would we do that when we don’t know who filled this out?
$Tom: … Ugh, fine. I have to go back on duty now, I’ll drop another one off tonight.
$Aech: No worries. I’ll be sure to process it for you first thing tomorrow
$Tom: Whatever…
$Aech: (Internally: Fuck you too, buddy)The next morning, sure enough there was a new form in the Out of Hours box. Complete with sarcastic underlining of his Employee number and name. As I update his details, I see that he’s put something under the ‘Preferred Name’ option. This is intended for people to have whatever name they prefer as their ‘First’ name on things like the company directoy. Preferred name as in shortening Matthew to Matt, Kimberley to Kim or somebody with an 'International’ legal name preferring to go by an 'English’ name.
For the sake of this, we’ll pretend that Toms last name is Jones. Obviously, Tom Jones isn’t his real name. I just went with an alternative that’ll help this bit make sense. Tom had put his preferred name as 'Jonesy’. He has one of those last names that can become a nickname if you add ’-y’ to the end of it. Apparently that’s what his manager and others in his department call him.
Since Tom clearly wanted me to update all of his details correctly this time, I did exactly as he told me to do and entered 'Jonesy’ as his preferred name. Once the intranet updated overnight, the employee directory now knows him by his preferred name, showing him as Jonesy Jones.
About a week after that change took hold, his manager sent me a screencap of Jonesy and asked why it was showing him as Jonesy Jones. I sent him the scanned forms and the short version of the story, asking if he wanted me to change it back. He replied:
Well, you did exactly what he told you to do, its right there on the form. If he wants to change it back he can do another form. If he’s a smartass about it again let me know and I’ll take care of it.
via @notiun
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