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August 03, 2005

names list

It was a decade ago. Mark and I were both fresh out of school and at MS. How long ago was this? I still thought that any quality work I did might actually make a difference. I was working on SQL, he on some product that never shipped. We were both stuck in our offices into the wee hours of the night, but at least we had this "e-mail" fad with which to kill time. I still have many of these e-mails, especially the etchings of me with barnyard animals that a bored Mark made in Paint. Those might be worth something someday. But I digress.

One night, I e-mailed Mark about a nameplate I had just seen: Anne Kruglick. "Poor girl," I wrote, chuckling.

"We should introduce her to Dick Butkus," Mark replied. "Then she could hyphenate and be 'Anne Kruglick-Butkus.' I've got a woman over here named Emily Hausenfluck, and the L and the U on her nameplate run together. That always catches my eye."

And so did we begin our ten-year labor of love, compiling a list of amusing names we ran into at work. It just dawned on me that since I am no longer in the employ of MS, there's no reason not to run this. As time went on, the bar grew higher and higher. So in order of discovery, here they are as they appeared in the corporate address book:

Where it didn't impact the joke, I've tweaked the names of the innocent. Where it would have impacted the joke...well, I'm very sorry. Blame your parents.

posted by john at 07:37 AM  •  permalink