A couple of days ago I was at the office of my work and going through their database of clients. Of course, the content of that database is confidential but I don’t think it’s any breach of security for me to say that I came across a person who was listed with the name “Brain”. My initial reaction was to think that somebody had mistyped ‘Brian’ but then I thought, shortly afterward, that it could just as easily be an actual person called ‘Brain’ and that it would be wrong of me to assume.
“I’ve just come across a listing in the database of somebody called ‘Brain’,” I said to my co-worker at the next desk, “at first I thought it was a typo, but I guess it could be their name, it’d be wrong of me to assume. I wonder what I should do.”
“Yeah, that’s a tricky one,” she said.
And I thought about it for a while. She was right, it was a tricky one. Eventually, I decided to call and just use the initial “B” when asking for whom to talk to.
Perhaps you can guess how things turned out, since I decided to make a blog post out of this, but ‘Brain’ actually was the person’s name and there hadn’t been a typo. I think this story illustrates quite nicely why it is wrong to make assumptions about other people and I’m pleased that I didn’t ask for a ‘Brian’.
“I’ve just come across a listing in the database of somebody called ‘Brain’,” I said to my co-worker at the next desk, “at first I thought it was a typo, but I guess it could be their name, it’d be wrong of me to assume. I wonder what I should do.”
“Yeah, that’s a tricky one,” she said.
And I thought about it for a while. She was right, it was a tricky one. Eventually, I decided to call and just use the initial “B” when asking for whom to talk to.
Perhaps you can guess how things turned out, since I decided to make a blog post out of this, but ‘Brain’ actually was the person’s name and there hadn’t been a typo. I think this story illustrates quite nicely why it is wrong to make assumptions about other people and I’m pleased that I didn’t ask for a ‘Brian’.
(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)