Sneaking In

For the past month or so I've been getting into a pattern of arriving at work around 9.40 - 9.45am. Its not because I wake up late. I still wake up at 7.30am, but for some reason I just can't seem to get my butt out of the apartment until 9am.

As I usually stay back late until about 6.30 - 7pm, my manager is pretty ok with this arrangement.

Except for days like today, when there is a GM quarterly address.

I didn't realise the GM meeting was on until I reached the office (at 9.35am - was slightly earlier today), and noticed the meeting request flashing from my MS Outlook.

Our GM has a habit to make fun of people, by this I mean saying 'Hi' to them when they walk in late and encourage everyone else to say 'Hi' to them as well and clap while the poor person tries to find a seat. This is in front of a group of about 60 people.

Or so I witnessed after our last quarterly meeting.

The meeting booking was for 3 hours. I couldn't see how I was going to get out of this. So I decided to quietly sneak in and enter from the backdoor of the meeting room.

Unfortunately he caught me.

Only this time he said this.

"Good morning... *blank stare* ... Oh I actually don't know your name, so I can't make fun of you.."

The whole room had about 3 seconds of silence, after which was followed by a roar of laughter, some of where were from my own colleagues.

After the laughter died down, I said "Well, this might be the only situation, when it might be good that my GM doesn't know my name", and sat down in an empty seat. Which was subsquently greeted by some more laughter.

There were two more unlucky souls after me who tried to sneak in as well, but unfortunately (or fortunately) for them he remembered their names.

For the whole afternoon now, I've had two department head managers, one operation manager, my own manager, and my manager's manager come down to see me.

All of us small potatos are on the lower levels, while the managers are on the higher levels of the building.

It was kind of weird. Most of these people, I don't usually see unless something had broken and we needed to go upstairs to be part of the line to face the firing squad.

Some of them actually walked by to say Hi to me, and specifically mentioning my name. And asked how things were. The operations manager actually congratulated on what I good job I had been doing supporting their people during the last outage period. (Happened about a month ago).

While my own manager, told me not to worry about it, and joked that maybe I should stop supporting those people the next time something goes wrong, and then they will definitely remember my name. My manager's manager came down about 20 mins ago asking me to walk upstairs with him, just so that he could personally introduce me to the GM.

I told him I didn't think it was necessary.

Is it really important for the highest manager (in Sydney anyway) at my company to remember my name ? or everyone's name in that matter ?!

I'm happy so long he signs my yearly payrise and bonus allocations.

Atleast now I know what to say at my Exit interview.

When they ask why I decided to leave my current company, my answer will simply be : The GM didn't remember my name.