Meet Joe Bloggs

You may know him as John Doe or John Q. Public, however over here his name is Joe Bloggs. He has a brother, Fred Bloggs and together they fill the role of placeholder names in England and Australia - specifically in teaching programs.

I discovered this as I was reviewing training materials for our SAP project where I kept running into Joe as a fake employee. At first I didn't get it, but after seeing his name show up repeatedly, I started to understand what was going on. I asked a colleague of mine if there was any particular origin to the name Joe Bloggs, but she had no idea. Do you know the origin of John Doe? No? Neither do I.

When looking it up on Wikipedia I found that there were many examples of placeholder names. The world is full of them. The most infamous of them seems to be Jane Roe as in Roe v. Wade. Others include: Richard Roe, Jane Doe, Mary Major, Richard Miles, John Stiles, John Smith, Joe Blow, Joe Schmoe, Max Mustermann (Germany), Erika Mustermann (Germany), Felix Muster (Switzerland), Maria Bernasconi (Switzerland), Mario Rossi (Italy), Peder Ås (Norway), Kari Holm (Norway), Anna Malli (Finland - Anna Malli translates literally to "Anna the Model"; does this give further depth to the Incubus song?), Seán Ó Rudaí (Translates to Sean O'Something), Juan Perez (South America) and Medel Svensson (Sweden).

There are plenty more where that came from, but I don't have the patience to list them all; nor do I suspect you have the patience to read. I hope you enjoyed your short lesson on the many variants of placeholder names. Any favorites that I haven't listed?

On the Back of a Fag Pack

Just to clarify: on this side of the pond, fags = cigarettes.

In Human Resources, we often laugh at the absurdities that occur throughout the business day. You need only look into any employee file to find scribbled notes on quarter-sheets of paper that say things like: "Give John a 3% increase," or "Jane missed work because of 'woman problems' today." Usually these notes are undated and indecipherable.

Since HR has developed as a profession, you find these absurdities occurring far less frequently, but they still occur. They are usually discovered when a large company acquires a small Ma & Pop establishment, where the owner's word was law - regardless of what actual laws are cast by the local regulatory agencies and governments. When auditing the acquired company's personnel files, you usually find all kinds of strange notes and other privacy violations. This usually occurs because the person that was doing the HR work at the acquired company has never formally been trained in legal compliance.

In the US, we have a euphemism for this kind of practice. We say that the agreement was made "on the back of a cocktail napkin." During a meeting today, I learned that the Brits have a different euphemism for the same practice - "on the back of fag packs"- or to translate for my US friends - "on the back of a pack of cigarettes."

The idea is obviously that whoever makes the declaration, doesn't care about a process. They simply just grab the nearest writing implement and the nearest scrawling surface - be it a cocktail napkin or a fag pack. The writing implement is always lost to history, but cocktail napkins and pieces of fag packs find their way into employee files and sit there for decades. Have you ever had an inkling to ask to see your employee file? You have the right.

P.S. By the way, that picture is an actual warning that is put on some cigarette packs in the European Union. It reads: "Smoking may reduce the blood flow and cause impotence" A colleague of mine that smokes jokingly told me one day while holding up his pack of cigarettes, "Dammit, I got impotence again."

Denis Laoghaire, the star of "Rescue Me"

Some of my Irish colleagues were asking me if I had any plans to do anything this weekend. This IS, after all, the international ADVENTURES of HRputer. I told them that I was planning on having an apartment ready to go and would probably spend my time moving in and making my new accommodations cozy. However, I added, I had a Plan B to go to Dun Laoghaire, which is a dock area south of Dublin City. It's supposed to be a beautiful walk along the coast. They looked at me cross-eyed.

I decided to explain to them my theory about making travel plans in Ireland:

Always have a Plan B. If you're planning to do something outdoors, always have a Plan B that is indoors. If you're planning on doing something indoors, have a Plan B that is outdoors. As an American I well knew the first of these to pieces of wisdom. Why, would you ask, do you need a Plan B when you have indoor plans?

If the weather is good, don't waste it. Be ready to go out and enjoy it.

I quickly learned that this wasn't what confused them; rather, it was my pronunciation of Dun Laoghaire. I pronounced it: Dune LaGare. They had a chuckle while explaining to me that it's pronounced Dun Leary.

Me: "Like Denis Leary, right?"

Them: "Who?"

Apartment Toilet

On my first few trips over to Ireland, I kept seeing signs that said "toilet." I started to wonder why people kept advertising their toilets. After awhile, I found it odd that they were all missing the "i" in the word. Then it dawned on me. "To Let" They're advertising that their apartment is To Let.

This is just one of those intricacies between how we speak English (at least in the Midwest states) and how the Irish speak it. I'm looking for apartments to let, not apartments for rent.

No progress on the apartment hunting today. I did get a call from a letting agent asking if I might be interested in viewing an apartment close to the hotel. The letting agent asked me when I was available and I said that I could be there in 10 minutes. He said that he needed to contact the tenant that was there to see when it would be alright if I came by. I haven't heard from him since.

I suppose that I shouldn't assume that everybody is waiting for me to look at their apartments. Yet, it would have been nice if when they contacted me to rent the apartment, they had a couple of times already set for me to choose from. Truth be told, I think that this was the letting agent's trainee that called me. I think he may have just learned something.