A coworker forwarded me an old mail I sent to announce that one of my peeps decided to change sexes.It's pretty awesome I broke the ground when it comes to this sort of thing in my decades old company. Enjoy!
__________
All,
I’ve already briefly reached out to you regarding
XXXX’s pending status change. Night shift guys, you’ll get the run down
in your mail when you get in.
I don’t believe in pussy-footing around so I wanted to get
the ball rolling with getting everybody on the same page. I have the thumbs up
from Citizen XXX to let everybody know we can start referring to XXX as ‘YYY’.
I could be very safe with the rest of this email, but
frankly the SOC is not a sterile corporate environment. No Operations unit ever
is, which is one of the reasons I will always be an ‘Ops guy’. We are far more
close knit than most environments. We’ve all known XXX a long time, and at
least a handful of us (myself included) are just as much friends with the
artist formerly known as XXX, as we are co-workers. This is a pretty
personal thing and I figure it warrants more of a personal address than
a sterile email that reads like a shift report with HR overtones.
That being said, let me put a bit more of a personal spin on
this mail and share with you how this all panned out…
Never let it be said that a XXX does not come
without an impeccable sense of timing. I got the big news news right after I
asked Darrin to inform my Boss I was missing his meeting due to a
ridiculously long spontaneous customer meeting. Said customer was on line “A”
of my phone. While I was trying to explain to Darrin what to tell my aforementioned
Boss regarding my absence, the STRANGEST thing happened! Line B rang in and a
rather exotic British accent told me that I needed to be on another phone call
right *now*. I began the dual conference call two-step. I
was doing just fine until my cell phone rang. Wielding my cell phone like
an Excuse Shield ™ , I put off several more requests for meetings, input,
pieces of my soul, etc…
And then my Communicator window popped up.
Our favorite Tipping Point expert pops up with “We should
talk, bring a pack of smokes”.
With visions of recent resignations dancing in my head, I
put myself on mute, IM’d BT folks on two different continents stating that I
needed to excuse myself from both of their concalls for a few minutes and got
outside for the dreaded phone call.
After a sigh of relief and what could have been considered
an inappropriate burst of laughter had I been talking to anybody but XXX, I
immediately responded with , “we are totally going to screw up and call you
XXX. We’re dudes, we’re obtuse and generally inconsiderate”. I
also implied those traits would need to be worked on if there was ever to
chance to be officially inducted into the cool kids club. After some more
laughter and friendly off-color jokes I won’t commit to this mail, I came back
in and feigned attentiveness to my two concalls while I wrapped my head around
my narrow escape from what I was sure was going to be a conversation of the “I
quit” variety.
The long winded point of this mail is that we should get
used to using ‘YYY’ as opposed to ‘XXX’
It’s a definitely a bit of a new situation for all of us.
That said, I’d like us all to keep the following in mind:
·
We still have our same old Tipping Point guru
·
You don’t have to walk on eggshells
·
Using the wrong name is completely
expected, we’ll get there and it’s understood everybody at some point is
going to drop the ‘XXX’-bomb.
·
No Josh, this does not mean it’s now cool
to get into fistfights with YYY over philosophical differences regarding
Tipping Point configurations. Savvy?
Now I’m gonna go head onto the COMPANY-Z Intranet and find
out which training module I missed to prepare me for this sort of thing.
Have a good evening folks. May your future days here
be just as interesting as mine.
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