Today without notification, the company began changing the display names on our emails to reflect the name on our Social Security cards. I, like many of my coworkers, have never been called by the name appearing on said card. Instead, my parents chose to call me by my middle name and the one which everyone has called me by my entire life. I don't even respond to my first name because I don't recognize it as a part of me. The name I use is my legal name, it just does not include that all important FIRST part of it. So my display name changed. Others here go by initials or nicknames and their names also changed. This has created mass havoc, you see, because we all use our "chosen" names as our professional names.
So randomly today people started getting emails from people they've never heard of. My coworkers couldn't find my email address in the global address book. I couldn't find MY coworkers in the global address book. Many of us have very ordinary last names, like Anderson, Smith, Wolf. There are multiple entries under these last names and good luck trying to determine who's who. This led to much humor making (because what else can you do) with many people signing off as "David, I mean George." Or saying things like, "To make things simpler please start calling me Robert or you can use my employee number, 6824." This became even funnier when it was discovered that we will soon start using our employee ID number to log into our Email server instead of our Email ID.
As a sidebar: The email people here told me the only way to change our display name is to change our name in HR, which is based on the afore mentioned Social Security name. Thus, the only way to change our display names is to LEGALLY change our names with the United States government.
All of this insanity is being lain at the feet of Sarbanes-Oxley, that glorious financial and accounting disclosure law, which apparently includes a clause about our emails reflecting the name on our Social Security card. [It actually falls under a provision mandating that CEOs and CFOs attest to their companies' having proper "internal controls."]
In a postscript to today's email drama, our division executives had no idea all of this was going on till we started complaining about it. It prompted this short email:
Yes, I became aware of the issue this morning. I have asked Denis to roll back the changes ASAP. We will still be interested in proceeding with changes but in a more orderly and coordinated manner.
The beauty of all of this is that we are in the communications business and yet there wasn't the least bit of communicating going on.
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