A Rare Work Story

That I can tell because it has nothing to do with work.

We're in a meeting chatting with a coworker whose wife just gave birth to his daughter a few weeks ago. We were a little shocked to discover that the child, despite being roughly 20 days old, still lacked a name!

The problem, it seems, is that both he and his wife drew up a list of possible names, but they don't like anything on the other person's list.

"Here's what you do.", I said, "Make two new lists. On the first list, you write down the name of every one of your female relatives. On the second, your wife writes down the name of every one of her female relatives. You compare the lists and if there is any overlap, that's the baby's name. This has the advantage that you can tell your relative that the baby is named for her, giving you some brownie points. Your wife can do likewise."

My coworkers weren't sure if I was joking or not (which isn't that unusual given my odd sense of humour). To show them that I was half serious I pointed out a personal fact.

"That's what my parents did with me", I said.

My boss chimes in:

"Your parents named you for two female relatives?"

As you can see, he also has an odd sense of humour.

As an aside, the reason I've always gone by James was to differentiate me from my uncle Jim Agnew and my uncle Jimmy Cyr.