Why Agnes

I've just noticed that I've been writing about Agnes a bit, but never actually why he's called Agnes.

What happened was that he really offended some of the sales team by offending their clients (i.e. our advertisers i.i.e. the people who help us pay our bills) so badly that the clients were threatening to pull out all their advertising.

And so the sales team have a constant stream of complaints about him, but they also don't want to rock the boat too much by showing how much they really hate him. As an example of how much they hate him, they completely ignore him every single time he talks to them. Even if he goes over to their desk, and stands right next to them, and calls them by name, they just pretend he's not there and keep on with whatever they were doing before he came up to them until he goes away.

So they gave him a nickname, Shrek. But that wasn't really working out because it was a bit too obvious. Shrek is a tall, fat, hairy monster and Agnes is...well...also tall, kinda fat and hairy.

So we began experimenting with various nicknames. And nothing really worked until one day, J got a call and went to Agnes' desk to look for a set of headphones.

J had sent Agnes out of office on some work stuff, but Agnes forgot his headphones and insisted that J bring them down to the taxi stand where he was. And oh, J better make sure that she was bringing the right set of headphones - the white pair. And there were two sets of headphones on his desk all right.

Only problem: both were white.

To be fair, one was white with orange squiggly patterns, while the other was white with a black logo stamped across the plasticky part. But still...both were white!

So J just took one set and went down, but Agnes got all huffy and said that J had got it all wrong, and stomped back up to office to get his headphones. When I saw him, I was mildly surprised and asked him how come he was back.

He said rather sulkily, and here I quote verbatim from memory, "J took down the wrong pair of headphones. I told her the white ones already." Then he stomped off. Quite literally too, with loud stomping noises to express his irritation.

I had to bite my lips to keep from giggling.

When J came back, I told her Agnes came back, and she said yes, precious (girly name that resembles his real name too much to publish) apparently can use only one pair of headphones when he goes out.

I protested at the use of that girly name - it was far too pretty to use on him! And besides it sounded too much like his own name, so I suggested Agnes instead. For some reason, it caught on, and now everyone calls him that.

Even his cubicle neighbour who's put up a large corkboard and a calender right on the divider that separates their work stations so that she doesn't need to look at him. Did I mention we're not the only ones who've been offended by him? Just the ones who got stuck with him.