Friday, May 05, 2006

Work Nicknames

I was having a conversation with some of my work colleagues yesterday and as we were talking it struck me that our chat must sound very bizarre to anyone who happened to be eavesdropping on us. Why is this I hear you ask?

Work Nicknames. This conversation was loaded with them! It hadn’t really occurred to be before how these names had evolved and by coincidence a friend (who lives in America) on instant messenger was telling me about a work colleague she hates and she referred to him by his work nickname. So we had a sharing session of these names we had bestowed on people.


"Good afternoon, Darth Hideous speaking. How can I help you?"

As we were comparing I observed that Australian work nicknames tended to be more metaphorical in nature, for example:

- “Penguin” – he looks like The Penguin from Batman
- “Emu” – she
has a bit of a ‘beak’ and is always looking around
- “Jessica Simpson” – given to any dumb blonde we come across but is mainly used for one person
- “Frogman” – hard to explain but it’s to do with the face and eyes mostly, with hindsight should probably have been ‘Toad of Toadhall’
- "Hurricane" - from category 1 to category 5

American ones were more descriptive of someone’s personality, for example “Whiny Pants" and my personal favourite…. “Darth Hideous” (inset) – given to someone with a particularly nasty heavy breathing habit. My friend found out that even she is not immune to this phenomenon and her nickname (I think she got off quite lightly!) is Jessica Rabbit (of Roger Rabbit fame). I’m not sure if I have one at my work, but I think the saying ‘Ignorance is bliss’ fits this situation quite well!

If I had known when I was at University just how professional people are in the corporate world that most of the day is given up to miscellaneous unproductive bitching and that everyone is given a nickname, I might have been tempted to do my final year dissertation on the subject instead of my riveting 10,000 words about Software Development Methodologies.

I’m interested to hear other stories of work nicknames and how they were created. Comments please.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, Jessica Rabbit here (see Louisa's post),

To add a few work nicknames from the American perspective:

- "crutch" - he always has an ailment and is off sick a lot

- "dead eye" - guy has a glass eye (yes we are a mean bunch)

- "crash" - breaks a lot of IT equipment

- "Poopy diapers" - the counter part to whiny pants in a different office.

- "K2" - replaced another girl with the same name starting with a K and is really tall

- "Oompa Loompa" - not the tallest of our employees....

And somewhere in all this name creating we actually get some work done!!

Anonymous said...

Darth Hideous - classic, I nearly fell of my chair! K2 was very clever too!

I'm sadly unaware of any nicknames I've had (but they are probably height related!) maybe it's not something that Brit offices "do", either that or I'm just not in on the gossip.. Probably the latter!

As for Jessica Rabbit - surely it should be made some kind of law that EVERY office should have a "Jessica"..