It’s Nerf Or Nickname!

I work with a team of programmers that has a good sense of humor and is regularly joking with each other. We had a government lead who was partially responsible for setting priorities as to what needed to be added to the software we were prototyping, which meant that he was important enough we had to talk to him, or about him, a number of times each day. He had always gone by a certain nickname during that time, and we were used to calling him that.

Then, we got a new developer who had the same name, except our developer’s legal name was the nickname, so he jokingly argued he had dibs on it. Our government lead admitted he used to hate the nickname as a kid and insist on his real name, so he didn’t mind being called by it now. Thus, we all sort of agreed each person would go by their legal name to avoid confusion in the future. The only problem is that we all kept calling the government guy by his nickname out of habit, to the regular confusion of our new developer.

One day, the new developer came in with a Nerf gun, which is honestly not that uncommon to see in an office like this. His explanation for it?

New Developer: “I’m sick of you calling [Government Guy] my name. It keeps confusing me and driving me postal. So the solution is obvious: from now on, when someone drives me postal by using the wrong name, I will simply have to shoot them!”

He was true to his word. Any time someone called the government guy by the developer’s name, he would turn around and shoot the offending party with a Nerf dart before going back to work. There were even a few times when it was clear we were about to mention the government lead and the developer would grab his gun and jokingly shake it menacingly at us to remind us to use the right name.

This was all done in good fun and we all had a laugh at it. We even kept a running tally on a whiteboard of who got shot the most. The funny thing, though, is that it worked; we all very quickly got used to using the new name under the threat of being shot!

A little while later, someone much higher up in the government, who we rarely saw, came down to speak with us and she called our government lead by his nickname. She didn’t notice that we all immediately glanced at the new guy as soon as she said it. For his part, he clearly looked down at the gun as if debating it, but he wasn’t brave enough to shoot her. As soon as she left, we all jokingly teased him about not shooting her.

New Guy: “I have this silly policy about not shooting people that have the ability to decide whether or not I get a paycheck, you see.”