agonyaunt | (no subject)

My wife is 12 weeks pregnant with our first child. We just made her pregnancy public to everyone. I manage a staff of nine. One of them is upset because she heard me answer another staff member's question about whether we have chosen a name. We have chosen a name that can be given to either a boy or a girl and has significance to both our families.

My staff member is upset because she wants to use that same name when she has kids. She is not currently pregnant and said herself there are no immediate plans for kids in her future. Even if she were pregnant, I don't see why our using the name means she can't.

Ever since she heard me answer the question, she has been cold and huffy toward me. She won't talk to me unless she has no other choice, and some of my other staff came to me because she is telling everyone who works here what a bad boss I am. However, she continues to complete all her work properly, be professional and warm to clients, arrive on time, etc. I don't know if I can or should do anything because her work is up to par. The name won't change, so I'm not sure how to address this with my staff member.

Agh, the people who think they have dibs on baby names. And it's playing out particularly weirdly here.

You could give it a few weeks and see if she regains her senses, or you could just talk to her head-on now. I vote for the latter. You could say something like this: "Jane, your behavior toward me has changed since you found out that my wife and I plan to name our baby Magenta. Can you tell me what's going on?" ... Followed by, "I understand that you're upset, but our choice in baby name has nothing to do with anyone here, and I'm sure you understand that we're not going to change it because someone else also liked the name." ... Followed by, "It's not OK to treat anyone here this way because of their choice of a baby name. I need you to figure out whether you can return to our regular working relationship. If you decide that you can't, then we need to figure out how to proceed since it's not tenable to have this kind of tension in the office. Do you want to take a few days to think about whether you can move forward?"

The idea here is to call her on the behavior, make it clear that it can't continue (because it can't, even if the rest of her work is good), and push her to decide whether she can pull herself together or not.

https://www.inc.com/alison-green/my-employee-is-angry-that-im-using-a-baby-name-she-wants-to-use.html

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Oh my Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooood.

I KNOW.

wow - just, wow.

that's even odder than the woman who lost it because a relative's rescue dog had the name she wanted to use. she demanded they change the dog's name (owner refused)

aren't some people ~~interesting~~ batshit?

So many very fascinating people with boundary issues.

i wonder if the employee is actually struggling with infertility or somethign like that. its the only way i could understand them being upset.

People are super weirdly possessive over baby names, though usually it's only with family members or (sometimes) friends in a tightknit friend group.

... and that is why you reveal a name AFTER the child is born...
Though that probably wouldn't have helped in this case. Still, this whole weird thing might give the name a slightly bad after taste for the prospective parents.

Probably not, because then the employee would be like, "You stole my name!" or some b.s. like it.

Staff member is clearly someone who's never had kids, because if she had she would discover that the name she thought was unique and interesting turns out to be shared by half her kid's daycare class.

And also: what the actual?

Exactly. My name was common in the five years around my birth; I always had another Linda in my classes (sometimes two) from Kinder through High School; it was no big deal. (Except the year my BFF was another Linda, and we sat next to each other, and it was hard to tell which one the teacher meant when he looked our way.) I just don't "get" the attitude that names are "special" and never to be repeated. If that's what people want, we need license-plate-style combinations of letters and numbers for our designations.

There exist at least four people in the US who have my same first-middle-last combination. As long as they don't share my social security number, I'm good.

Right? If my parents were the kind to get mad about this, they would have been mad every day of our childhoods - my and both of my sisters all ended up with some of the most common names in our age cohort.

My first name was actually fading in popularity; I don't run into people who share it that often, and when I do they're usually around ten years older than me. But the nickname I used was extremely common; there were at least four of us in one of my elementary school classes, and we all spelled it differently. We coped.

I worked with a Steve married to someone with an equally common name, and they wanted to spare their kid from that. So after much research, they picked Ariel. A month later, The Little Mermaid came out.

Oh nooooooooooooooooooooooo

All three of my kids have had at least one classmate named Arwen.

My maternal grandmother really did have a unique name growing up. She was the only Carmen she ever met in Belgium. (Her mother was a fan of Bizet, and thought it was a pretty and unusual name.)

Then she married an American soldier and moved to an area of the Bronx with a heavy Puerto Rican population.

From one of a kind to a dime a dozen, and all for the cost of a wedding ring!

This will be my youngest's situation if he ever moves to Europe. He's named after his great-grandfather who immigrated from what's now the Czech Republic to the States; while lots of kids have the English or Spanish version of his name, the Czech version's very rare here.

But plug Youngest's first and last name into Google, and there's thousands of folks in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, etc. who share his same name.

I teach 18-22-year-olds and sheer number of Madisons and Maddies I have is amazing. Unique names are hard to come by!

Seriously, do you know how many "Jennifer/Jenny/Jenna/Jenn's" there were in my graduating class? 14%. Even the Teenager, whose name, while not unusual, has a classmate with the same name. Just...chill, co-worker.

Edited 2022-02-11 23:28 (UTC)

My father was once in a math class with 12 Roberts and one Roberta. It must have been memorable, he told me about it multiple times.

Alison is right to focus her advice on maintaining an appropriate working relationship. The employee can have whatever (bizarre) feelings she wants about the name. She cannot allow those feelings to affect her behavior at work or interfere with anyone's ability to do their job.

What the ENTIRE FUCK

Isn't the whole "one unique name per child" a mormon thing? I remember reading something about how mormon women were encouraged to plan their marriage and motherhood, and there was a lot of drama over "stealing" names, so that led to the mothers coming up with increasingly creative spellings of the same names to avoid these kind of accusations.

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if certain cultures place more emphasis on unique names for whatever reason, but a lot of people are VERY into a name being THEIRS for no real reason whatsoever.