should people be fired for big, public mistakes; managing a former friend; and more

by Alison Green on March 14, 2025

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…

1. Should people be fired for big, public mistakes?

I’m curious about your thoughts on Major League Baseball’s recent blunder. They released a new series of hats that have the logo imposed on top of the team location. For the Texas Rangers, they did not think through the word they would create.

Tetas is a slang word for breasts in Spanish. If you were managing a team that let this slip through, how would you handle it? Would people be fired for something like this?

I’m not a fan of firing people for single mistakes in their work (conduct is in a different category), unless there’s something about the mistake that goes to their fundamental fitness for the job. If someone was already struggling, sure, this could easily be the final straw — but if the person responsible was otherwise doing a good job and you were happy with their work previously, there’s no point in firing someone for one blunder (even a big one). In fact, if the person is generally conscientious, there’s a good chance that they’re now more valuable to you than they were a month ago because they just learned a massive lesson that’s likely to stick with them and be incorporated into their work going forward.

Also, with this kind of mistake, there were presumably many people who signed off on the design and should have caught it before it was finalized. It points to a need to change their processes so it can’t happen again, not to firing a dozen people for missing it.

2. Managing a former friend

I am struggling in my current toxic workplace and I’m keen to get a new job, but opportunities in my niche technical field and local area are rare. One such job has come up this week and whilst it’s not directly what I do now, I think I would be a viable candidate and would be happy working at this new organization. However, I met with the hiring manager who outlined the current team, which includes a friend who I have not spoken to in a year due to her professional behavior (breaking confidentiality and getting former colleagues into trouble, basically acting like she is in Mean Girls). It’s so awkward! I can’t imagine being her manager and supporting her when I feel like she is lacking in values that are core to professional conduct.

Should I still apply for the job and hope I can skate past the awkwardness? Or save myself the trouble? The hiring manager mentioned that line management could be discussed; I have wondered if confiding in him would make me look dramatic. This may all be moot if I don’t even get an interview but I’d rather make an informed decision.

Can you get yourself to a place where you can manage her fairly and objectively? If not, you should pass up the job; it’s not fair to anyone (definitely the ex-friend, but also the rest of the team and the organization hiring you to manage her) to come in already knowing that you’d be hindered by the history in a pretty significant way. But I don’t think it’s impossible to walk into a situation like that and manage fairly! You’d need to keep in mind that people can change and she may have learned some lessons in the last year and be willing to give her a fair shot at showing that she has. If you see that she hasn’t, you’d need to address that the way any good manager would (and you would benefit from knowing what to be looking out for, just like with the letter about the chaos employee earlier this week), but you’d need to come in with an open mind. You’d also likely need to have an air-clearing conversation with her when you start, along the lines of “I know we have history but as far as I’m concerned, we’re starting fresh.”

If that feels impossible, pass this one by.

If you do apply, I think you’d need to disclose to the hiring manager that you know the team member but have fallen out of touch. I wouldn’t share much more than that because of the risk of it just seeming like capital-d Drama, but if you don’t disclose it at all, it’s likely to come out at some point anyway and will seem very weird that you didn’t. (Be aware that if you do that, they’re likely to ask the employee about you … but from a minimizing-drama standpoint, if there’s anything to be aired out there, it’s better for it to be now rather than after you’re on the job.)

3. Executives winning company raffles

I work for a company with about 500 employees. Every year the company hosts a large professional conference and all employees are required to attend. On the final day of the conference, door prizes are awarded.

This year, the organizers had each attendee put their name tag in a box, and names were drawn at random to determine the recipients of the prizes. The prizes ranged from books by presenters to gift cards to one large prize that was worth close to $1,000. When the prizes were announced, four of them, including the large final prize, went to people who work in senior management. This rubbed me the wrong way and I want to know if I’m off-base to think that the most senior staff members shouldn’t be entering raffles like this. I was able to see the drawing from my seat and there didn’t appear to be any cheating. I just don’t feel like their names belonged in the drawing to begin with. I’d much rather see an administrative assistant or the entry-level recent college grad walking out with a prize than someone whose salary is ten times as large. What are your thoughts?

You are not off-base. Senior level managers should not enter raffles where they’ll be competing for desirable prizes with lower-paid employees, and the optics if they win a big-ticket item are really bad. The gracious move would have been for them either not to enter or, when they won, to decline and ask for a new pick to be drawn.

4. Is it weird to suddenly start going by a nickname a year into my job?

I’ve been working in a remote job, my first full-time job in my industry, for a little over a year now. The entire time I’ve worked there, I’ve gone by my legal name, Anne. I use it in my email signature, and pretty much everyone I am in contact with addresses me as such.

However, in my personal life, I go by Annie pretty much all the time. I put Anne in my email signature when I first started because I’m pretty new to the professional world and it seemed like the savvy thing to do, but now seeing how many people I am in contact with use their nicknames in the professional world, I’m more inclined to use my nickname.

Since I’ve worked at this job for over a year and have gone by Anne the whole time, would it be weird to suddenly switch my email signature to Annie? I’m mainly concerned with it seeming weird to my boss, who is the primary person I’m in contact with at my job. Especially since it’s remote, it feels so much more awkward to slyly switch my name in my email signature and hope everyone catches on.

It will not be weird! Switch your email signature to Annie. You can either leave at that, or you can say to your boss, “By the way, I should have said this when I started but I actually prefer Annie so I’ve changed it in my email signature and didn’t want you to be confused.”

And yes, it’s totally fine to go by nicknames at work. Not, like, Keg Master or Big Balls, but a normal name that’s just a diminutive? Yes.

You may also like:
{ 463 comments }

{ 463 comments… read them below }

    2. Cmdrshprd*

      OP 4, if you want to go by your nickname “Annie” to everyone that is fine.

      But you can also keep Anne in your signature so people know your legal name if they need it for something, and do a personal sign off of “Annie.”

      Also I know plenty of people that use their legal name for more formal communications and/or with external contacts, but use their nickname with internal contacts and/or key external people they deal with frequently.

      It does not have to be one or the other you can mix it up as needed.

      1. Chocolate Teapot*

        Some people I work with have an official name which appears in their email address and then the nickname they go by on a daily basis, such as Elizabeth Smith on agreements but Liz in the office.

        1. wordswords*

          My only caveat there would be to make sure there’s no email confusion. I used to work at a place that had firstname.lastname@company emails, and my official email address had, let’s say, amelia.lastname but I went by Mel. (Not my actual name, but as an example.) I ended up having to get IT to give me a mel.lastname address too that would forward emails straight to my main account, because too many people were trying to email me at the nickname they knew me by and having their messages lost in the ether.

          Once that redirect address was set up everything was fine, though!

          1. Op4/Annie*

            luckily I won’t have this issue as my company does emails as (first initial)(last name) and my nickname and first name start with the same letter! But def smth good to note for other cases

          2. JustaTech*

            I am currently having this problem! I have several coworkers at other sites who I Can Not find in our email directory. One of them I know goes by a nickname, but the other one, I would not describe the name he used as a nickname or a diminutive, and it’s very weird to have to email someone across the country and be like “hey, what’s Bob’s email?” because it makes me sound like an idiot.
            But when everyone is on a first name basis it can be surprisingly hard to find people in the email directory (especially if your directory search is not great).

          3. Rainy*

            My last job had a list of approved nicknames for every name and if your nickname wasn’t an approved nickname for your legal name you couldn’t have it in your email address. This is particularly stupid because they use a stable identifier/applied alias model, so your core identity for everything is something like “lmnop123456@host” and then they assign you a first.last@host email.

            My nickname is both a common word and a common nickname for a different first name. I was eventually able to change my email alias to first&middle initial+last, but until then people were basically emailing into a black hole, because they’d send their emails to Rainy.Reminder@host and they’d just disappear. I literally could not get IT to create me a Rainy.Reminder email because “Rainy is only an approved nickname for Rainbow, not for Rasputina.” Which, my dude, if your name was Rasputina you’d go by something else too. I’m almost fifty and no one has ever called me by my legal name (it’s not Rasputina but it’s…not great, and it also REALLY doesn’t suit me) including my family!

            My new job has a standard lastname (or first chunk of lastname) and first initial email and your alias is whatever you go by, so I had zero problems.

              1. Rainy*

                No idea at all. I think it also depended on who got assigned to your ticket. A previous Director at that job got married, her email address changed, got divorced, changed her name back to her original last name, and couldn’t get IT to change her email alias back to her original name. A different colleague got divorced and was able to change her email back to her original name even before the name change paperwork went through.

        2. Landry*

          Yeah, I know someone who goes by Ben in verbal conversation, instant messages and informal emails (as well as his personal life) but he likes Benjamin any time his name has to appear publicly or in official documents.

          1. JustaTech*

            I’ve had two bosses who went by the informal version of their name in their work life, but then for some specific forms needed to go by their full name (think Rob vs Robert) which is fine for one, but for the other there are two common spellings of the full name and I’m like, where do I look this up?

            (Concur, of course, wants to tell me their middle names and I’m just like, please stop.)

          2. amoeba*

            That’s pretty much how almost everybody who uses a nickname does it here in Germany! I’m actually kind of surprised by how different it seems to be in the US. I know so many Steffis and Michas and Tobis, who all still use “Stefanie”, “Michael”, and “Tobias” for anything formal/official.

      2. Productivity Pigeon*

        Yeah, I said that in a comment below!

        I had one colleague named Eric (or another normal name) who exclusively went by Buster. It was his company email handle and everything!

        I almost exclusively use my nickname (Cissi for Cecilia) in my private life and with ~80% of my professional contacts.
        I still use Cecilia in my email and when I’m first introduced to someone professionally.

        When I started working after college, I was afraid I would seem immature or unprofessional if I used a nickname.
        Eventually, I worked up the courage to ask most of my bosses to call me Cissi but there were always a few grand bosses where that just felt like it would’ve been too familiar.

        1. Goreygal*

          I go by an unusual diminutive of my name and have been using it professionally for over 30 years. It’s my email alias, my signature name and my day-to-day name. HR obviously know my full name and my employment contract names me by my full name but even they call me by my diminutive. 99.9% of my colleagues think i just have an unusual first name and have no idea it is a diminutive. I write medico-legal reports and use it there too, along side my professional registration number. Your signature does not legally need to match your full name ( if it did how would all those people who’s signature is a squiggle do anything).

          All being to say, switch it everywhere you need to if that’s your preferred name. IT/whomever sets up email at your work should be easily able to add it to their system as your email alias so all future emails you write will come from annie.blogg@company.com. Emails sent to anne.blogg will still reach you.

        2. JustaTech*

          There was a guy in my college who went exclusively by a nickname. A … not safe for work but very college nickname, and since everyone thought of it as his name we stopped thinking about what it sounded like to outsiders. (A similar example is my friend Bastard.) He even got his school email changed to the nickname.

          Then one day he got horribly, dangerously sick and ended up in the hospital. So some folks went to visit him and got all the way to the nurses’ station before realizing they had no idea what his first or last name were, and you can’t just ask to see “Babydoll” (not the real nickname). It took a surprising amount of work to figure out his first name!

          1. Sharpie*

            A late friend of mine was known as Chewie by everyone. I don’t know how I learned his actual name but I do remember being able to answer someone’s question as to who this David guy was that they needed to talk to about some paperwork for an event that was being planned. Turns out I was about the only person there who knew Chewie’s actual legal name.

            (Not a job, we were all part of a hobby group, FWIW.)

        3. JB*

          I do think there’s a bit of a sliding scale with even common nicknames regarding professional use. But maybe it’s just me…my rule of thumb is to always address people using the name they sign off with at the bottom of emails, but there have been two cases where I haven’t been able to do that.

          One is someone at my company who is very senior to me, and she signs off with a nickname very similar to “Cissy” (although not exactly the same). It just feels very familiar to me and I can’t bring myself to use it. There are plenty of other women’s diminutive nicknames I don’t have this issue with, like Pattie, Dottie, Minnie, etc. but a few to me feel extra familiar like I shouldn’t be calling someone at the VP level that way. I think I am not the only one who feels that way because there are a lot of people I work with who also use her full first name.

          The other was an attorney I needed to correspond with once who signed off as “Dickie”. I just couldn’t do it. I addressed him as “Atty (lastname)”.

          1. Rainy*

            I’m from an area originally where a lot of families exclusively used family nicknames for their kids until they moved out of the house, and “Sissy” and “Bubba” are two of the most common. I’ve met some Cissy/Cissi for Cecelia folks and Bubba for William or Robert folks over the years, and it always makes me feel a little weird because where I’m from those are names you only use for children.

            (Cecelia wasn’t super popular as a name when I was a kid, and the ones I knew didn’t go by Cissy. One went by Cece (cee-cee) and the other went by Celie, iirc.)

        4. Steve*

          I use a perfectly common diminutive of my full, legal name (Steve for Stephen). It’s in my email alias, etc. HR has no problem figuring out that it’s not my official legal name. Sometimes I have to send paperwork back because they made it out for Steven instead of Stephen, but even that is uncommon. They deal with this kind of thing all the time. One of my teammates uses his middle name, and nobody gets confused by that either.

          1. PS1*

            I was allowed to use Steve (vs Steven) as my name in email at old company before it was bought out by new company, even though Steven is my full legal name. New company just used Steve when they put me in their system when they bought old company and has everything as Steve, books travel at Steve, tax documents as Steve, and it’s never been an issue.

        6. Freya*

          One of my clients, their 2IC does something similar – email address and all communications are addressed to their alias. But for payroll, taxes, and superannuation, it has to be their legal name, and that’s had to go in the internal helpfiles for that client, because the accounting system has no useful way to log that this important-to-client person’s preferred name has nothing to do with their legal name.

      3. Happy meal with extra happy*

        Yup, I do this at work – my email/signature line is my full name, but day to day, I go by a diminutive, common nickname of it (which I have since I was about 7). People I don’t work with closely do call me by my full name, but I’m 100% fine with it.

        1. KateM*

          I have a surname consisting of two long surnames, I sign off using only one of them even in official emails (I’d need to be writing at least to a government office to use both).

      4. Earlk*

        How often in a work context do people need to know your legal name though? Other than payroll.

        1. Tg33*

          Anyone booking airline tickets would need to know your legal name as it is on your passport

          1. L*

            I actually have a colleague who once got stranded in another country because his department admin booked his ticket for first name: nickname+1st-syllable-of-lastname and last name: last-2-syllables-of-lastname-but-spelled-differently. Both the first and last name she booked under were perfectly plausible names, but not only were they incorrect, they were a completely different language than his actual name. (No, I don’t know how he got to that country in the first place with the wrong name on his ticket.)

            When I first started here, I replaced that department admin, and I have to say, I credit at least some of his championing of my career progression to the fact that I never booked him an incorrect plane ticket.

            1. hummingbird*

              So, dude never looked at his own documents that someone else booked for him? It’s on him. The mistake wasn’t a single letter typo.

            2. jez chickena*

              I worked with a travel planner who frequently mistyped legal names and then claimed she couldn’t fix it. She once booked me into a hotel with hookers working out front. She would also book national travel on buses instead of planes. Her role was finally changed when she booked our CEO into a hostel.

              1. Nack*

                Not to derail this thread too far, but this amazes me! Do you think it was weaponized incompetence or was actually just clueless?

                1. Sashaa*

                  Obsessive desire to save the company money. I’m thinking about the avocado expenses guy, and the employee who was trying to prop up a failing company financially by abstaining from (company-provided) pizza, and opting out of the pension scheme.

            3. Wendy Darling*

              I got stuck in an airport ticket counter line behind a guy who had accidentally reversed his first and last names on his airline ticket and it seemed like a nightmare.

          2. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

            I have told this story here before, but the impetus for me to finally do the name change I had been half-ass planning for a decade was when my then-boyfriend’s parents bought me international plane tickets under the name they didn’t know wasn’t actually on my legal identification. I didn’t have my passport yet and it turned out that in Washington, a legal name change was actually cheaper and (functionally) faster than changing the name on the tickets, so I considered it a directive from the universe and knocked that out the next day. I don’t think my now-ex-in-laws ever actually found out about the whole thing. Heh.

            1. a perfectly normal-sized space bird*

              When I was first going to college, my mother filled out my financial aid paperwork with my nickname rather than full first name for reasons I never knew. Said loan servicer was through a regional bank that required me to have a checking account as well, also under my nickname. It later got bought out (and bought out and bought out) and eventually became absorbed into Wells Fargo. I found out the hard way when I went to pay off the loans still held there that they wouldn’t even let me so much as look at my statement because my legal name didn’t match the name on my account. They wouldn’t let me use my birth certificate as proof because it didn’t the nickname on it. I had other WF accounts under my legal name but somehow they weren’t linked. I don’t remember how I fixed it, I just remember the end result was closing all the WF accounts I had because I was so over it.

              So lifeprotip: Always make sure names match on financial and legal documents because boy howdy can it be a pain to prove that no really, if my name is Jennifer Esmerelda Realperson, then Jenny Esmerelda Realperson who has the exact same social security number is likely also me.

        2. Charlotte Lucas*

          I work in state government. We’re required to our legal name incorporated into our email address.

          1. The Rafters*

            I retired from State government. Interestingly, we were not required to use our legal name in our e-mail address.

            1. doreen*

              I retired from state government and we really weren’t given a choice – there were a couple of people I knew who had first initial middle name last name. I’m not at all sure how they managed that , since everything (email, HR records, computer log-ins) had to be the same name – maybe they legally changed their first name to the middle initial but the guy who went by “Tony” had an email address of “Canthony lastname”

          2. Sir Nose d'Voidoffunk*

            Interesting! I go by a nickname that’s not on my birth certificate and is completely different from my actual name. I work in state government now after starting in private industry and nonprofits, and the only places that used my actual first initial in my email address were the private businesses. Nonprofit and government agency both use first initial of nickname and last name.

            Then again, the nonprofit I worked at was a .com and my government agency is a .org, so maybe my employers have just been weird.

      5. Op4/Annie*

        true! thinking of switching my email signature to annie but switching it up sometimes is also a good idea

        1. RT*

          I always sign off with my nickname with my signature still having my legal name.

          Example:

          The report looks good!

          Thanks,
          Rob

          Robert Smith
          Senior Analytical Assistant Whatever
          Data Department
          (etc)

        2. Annie2*

          I’m not actually an Annie but something similar to Steph/Stephanie – I don’t mind either version of my name, but usually go by Steph. My email signature says Stephanie and if I like someone I write ‘Steph’ above it. Just another option if for whatever reason it’s easier to keep your email signature as your full name.

      6. Always Tired*

        I do this. My Linkedin is also under my big name (think Samantha). Thus, when people try to be chummy like we know each other, but call me my full name, I know they are full of it. Meanwhile, you can create a quick intimacy when, after the first introduction you pull the “please, call me Sammy! Everyone on my team does.”

        1. Wendy Darling*

          My linkedin name has an emoji in it because mass-mail bots always keep the emoji but humans never do, so it makes it easy for me to tell the difference. If I get a message for Wendy I know what happened.

          I’ve even gotten a couple emails that called me Wendy.

          1. Wendy Darling*

            Oops, the comment ate my emojis! Well, imagine little rocketships before both the Wendys in the body of that comment…

      7. Tempest*

        My name is Anne and half the people call me Annie anyway, so maybe most people won’t notice the change! (Not as a nickname, these are customers who are speaking to me for the first time so they are basically mispronouncing.)

    1. irianamistifi*

      It will be. It’s not the first time this happened. Fanatics, which is the company making MLB gear has been using AI to design their product this year and has taken to simply applying the same transformation filter on each piece of clothing for every team, regardless of the final design. Hence last year’s glorious Oakland A’s asshat. (https://www.complex.com/style/a/tracewilliamcowen/oakland-as-ass-hat)

      It did spectacular sales and was then pulled. I’m inclined to think that this particular scenario actually DIDN’T have a specific person to fire. This is the end result of offloading human driven design and decisions to machines.

      1. WheresMyPen*

        Who in their right mind thinks it’s sensible to send an AI-generated product to production without having a human sign off??

        1. WeirdChemist*

          Fanatics is known for being *very* cheap. They in fact got some bad PR when they first took over MLB uniform creation because of how many players ripped their new cheaply-made pants running around and sliding into base. Not to mention issues with logos printed backwards, designs coming off in a single wash, etc….

          So cutting out as many paid humans in their process as (they think) possible seems right on track for them imo!

            1. NoNamer*

              They were not a bit see through, they were completely see through! By the end of spring training, with no effort on my part, I knew which players on my team wore briefs and who wore compression shorts, and what brand!! My friends and I kept joking that a player was going to wear bright pink undies to prove how low quality the uniforms were.

                1. RVA Cat*

                  That Oakland Asshat takes a whole new meaning if the transparent pants show players wearing a thong or jockstrap.

              2. Mallory Janis Ian*

                “with no effort on my part” is sending me — I’m afraid I might have actually made the effort, myself Lol

        2. Falling Diphthong*

          This is my ongoing puzzle with AI. There are spots to use it for a middle step. But not the final step! It’s not actually intelligent; it didn’t understand the assignment nor what it produced.

          1. MigraineMonth*

            It’s not actually intelligent; it didn’t understand the assignment nor what it produced.

            I’d like to shout this from the rooftops. ChatGPT is a just a really sophisticated parrot. It has no idea what it’s saying, it is just repeating what it’s heard elsewhere. Image generation doesn’t know how many fingers humans are supposed to have. Even more traditional machine-learning algorithms don’t know you’re trying to hire the most qualified people, it just learns that you’ve discriminated against women and black/latine people in the past and applies those lessons. There are examples of robots that they tried to use AI to teach to pick up a ball, that instead learned to fake it for the cameras.

            AI can be a powerful tool under careful human supervision, but you can never trust it to be honest, objective, or understand the assignment.

            2. Ari Flynn*

              I experimented with using AI placeholders for a project, and found it is WAY better at getting the correct number of fingers and toes on a rat.

          2. Momma Bear*

            Agreed. At some point there needs to be human eyeballs on the thing, not just blind acceptance that the AI knows best.

        3. Down on it*

          Have you ever met a businessman? A single one? Just one?

          This is the nightmare we live in, a AI-driven landscape of absurdity and idiocy, all so a certain upper class can make money. When are we going to stop putting up with it?

      2. ecnaseener*

        That explains why the whole line looks so lackluster. Even without forming real words, someone should’ve pointed out that BO️ON and AN️ELS and CarSLals just look bad.

        But the article says they pulled TETAS from production already so it’s not going to get a chance to sell well!

            1. Phony Genius*

              The NaWals hat is best of the bunch. Maybe they should change their name to the Washington Narwhals.

              2. WantonSeedStitch*

                They absolutely should. “They’re the Jedi of the sea! They stop Cthulhu eating ye!”

              4. Princess Sparklepony*

                I could get behind that. Narwhals are pretty darned cool. Those unicorn horns are spectacular.

          2. Annie*

            yeah, if the A on the Angels hat was a little bigger ad covered that E….ANALS!

            Worse than the A’s Ass hat!

            1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

              My coworker just showed me that! And also, Boston looks like BoBoon, and Astros looks like ASS HOS

        4. Wilbur*

          I don’t think it’s just AI, I just think design in sports is being dominated by a small group of companies. I remember 10-15 years ago Nike started taking over design of college athletics apparel. They took all the fun and interesting designs that were probably done by college staff/students, and whatever existing IP they kept was “updated” to something completely forgettable. I hate that something that should be so local keeps getting outsourced to big corporations.

        5. MigraineMonth*

          That does seem… ill-considered. “Let’s take two things people are excited about, and mix them together in a weird/nonsensical way that honors neither?”

      3. The Cosmic Avenger*

        I dunno, I think they should fire Fanatics, and whoever in MLB approved hiring them! But then, I would have nixed the whole idea of AI design being final without a lot of evaluation and review, too!

        But before I knew how it had happened, my first thought was that the Rangers front office is probably all white men, they probably could have stopped this if they had any “DEI hires” (quotes for sarcasm).

        1. Phony Genius*

          Since it’s a league-wide product line, I wouldn’t be surprised if the individual teams didn’t get to see each design before they were released.

        2. Dek*

          I mean, while it might be Spanish slang, it’s close enough to a few English slang words for breasts as well that I feel like even monolingual folks should’ve caught that.

          I didn’t know about the AI though. That’s, frankly, disgusting.

            2. Thegreatprevaricator*

              I was going to argue that this was a great case for diversity in decision making, as someone catches it. But then I realise there wasn’t decision making … although still means diversity in sign off of product

          2. Annie2*

            Yes. I don’t speak Spanish, but come on – it’s at the very least a near homonym for an English slang word!

            1. Princess Sparklepony*

              I believe there are some breast cancer awareness stickers that say Save the Tatas!

          3. Festively Dressed Earl*

            My white male monolingual spouse immediately started giggling and suggested that Fanatics have all their designs evaluated by a thirteen year old boy before finalizing them.

        3. Princess Sparklepony*

          Reminds me of decades ago when Chevy put out the Nova which sold very well in Mexico despite the name translating to No Go in Spanish. I am also guessing that Chevy had few DEI hires at that time.

      4. juliebulie*

        Yikes, what a mess. A collector’s item for sure, but I wouldn’t put it on my head. (Maybe on my butt.)

      5. Annie*

        Both of those hats are totally hilarious! If I knew about them I think I would’ve bought one just because it’s an instant rare collectable item! hahaha!!

      6. Alexander Graham Yell*

        Well this answers my question of “How can a team based in Texas not have a single Spanish speaker in a decision-making role?”

      7. penny dreadful analyzer*

        When I was wee all the locally based sports teams for children had a three-letter initialism/abbreviation of the team name on the hat, and these hats were all printed by our local mom and pop sporting goods store, Alfred’s. Nobody really cared about their actual team hat; the hot item for school-aged children was simply the hat advertising Alfred’s Sports Shop.

      8. goddessoftransitory*

        I’m guessing that given the huge sales of A**, T**s was not only okayed at the end but deliberate the whole way thorough.

    2. Oniya*

      The Houston Astros’ hat is another top-tier design. (Logo is an H in a star. It obscures the ‘tr’ in the name -> Ashos. If there was a human design team, they’d be asking themselves ‘Are We the Ashos?’)

      1. Professional Engineer*

        There’s an organization of state transportation agencies called AASHTO, which stands for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. But from up until 1973, the word Transportation was not part of the name, so it was just called AASHO. Somehow, everybody thought this was OK. Times were different, I guess.

        1. Sweet 'N Low*

          There used to be a company near me called Analtech. They didn’t change their name until *2017*.

          1. wavefunction*

            The correct abbreviation for Analytical Chemistry is Anal. Chem. (for citations and the like). It’s always amusing to me.

            1. Kevin Sours*

              I took a class in college that was listed as “Math Anal” on my schedule. Previous it was Fun Math.

              2. 2e asteroid*

                I took that one too, complete with Anal exams.

                Then the successor course had oral Anal exams…

              3. DisgruntledPelican*

                I took a Comparative Literature class in college. It is literally on my transcripts as CLit.

            2. some dude*

              My work likes to shorten “cumulative” to “cum”, as in “cum investments” or “cum profits.”

      2. Sir Nose d'Voidoffunk*

        The entire AL West wound up with some hilariously inappropriate hats, even once they removed the Tetas.

      3. juliebulie*

        I searched in vain for the Red Sox version of the hat, which I assume would say either RedBSox, which I kinda like, or BosRSton which doesn’t mean anything… but I didn’t find anything, although I always do a double-take at the “Sox” hat that looks like “Sex” (a classic).

        1. Phony Genius*

          It says BoBon. You can see it in a graphic at the link in the original post, along with all the other teams.

        2. Mallory Janis Ian*

          All these issues just go to show that there is some actual graphic design skill involved in overlapping a team’s or company’s initial letter over the rest of their name in a way that makes visual sense; one does not simply plop an initial on top of a name and call it finished.

      4. Not Tom, Just Petty*

        JUST SAW THIS while my coworker was showing me the Anel hat, I said, what about the Asshos? We collectively lost it.
        Miami..mmmmmi.
        and the Nationals…sitting at my desk wondering which city has a team called NarWhals…
        OMG the Nationals…

    3. Productivity Pigeon*

      Yeah, it’s the kind of mistake that is silly and innocent enough that it doesn’t become offensive and instead just makes people laugh.

      And if it helps with sales, I doubt the company will be too displeased!

      (As opposed to, say, the time a clueless comedian in my country ordered a shirt that said Treblinka…)

      1. Lady Lessa*

        Sad thing about the comedian’s error (which is huge), is I wonder how many of the younger generations would even pick up the problem. In the US, especially.

        1. JustaTech*

          I don’t consider myself young and I had to go ask Wikipedia, so, yeah….
          (It was an extermination camp in WWII.)

        2. Mango Freak*

          In the US I don’t think it’s a particularly an age thing. It’s probably more a function of “are you Jewish, or at least did you go to a school with an above-average Jewish population.”

          (I am and did, so, yeah. Yikes.)

      2. Not Tom, Just Petty*

        I like the Rays, because it reads RTBs…”return to base” so I’m thinking there is ONE happy coincidence in this clusterfudge of failure.
        Again, WHAT CITY IS HOME OF THE NARWHALS? (it’s Nationals, took me too long to realize!)

        1. No photos please*

          I always see the Narwhals logo and wonder when Walgreens started sponsoring a baseball team.

    4. Seeking Second Childhood*

      I have an ear worm from “Chorus Line”, with Tetas and ASS.

      (“…Bought myself a fancy pair, tightened up the derriere. Did the nose with it, all that goes with it!”)

    6. JSPA*

      I came here to say that. And if they destroy 95% of the stock, the rest will be selling at crazy prices on ebay.

      But if the oops wasn’t semi- intentional (passed with a wink) then… that’s what you get for not having Spanish speaking employees. Cultural diversity: it’s about making your company more competent.

    7. LureKing*

      As a graphic designer, I see on so many graphic design comments on LinkedIn or where ever “Someone was definitely fired over this!” on everything. And it’s almost always very unlikely.

      Like the response above, it’s like 10 people reviewing and approving things at all levels from the designer to their boss’s to the hat company.

    8. CoffeeTime*

      Honestly I wouldn’t be shocked if it was intentionally let through just for that reason. Make a bunch of money, release an “oops!” statement, then re-release the polished version – some folks will buy both and some folks that wouldn’t have bought a polished version will buy the ‘oops’ version.

      If it were a slur or something that’d be different, but “haha it accidentally says boobs” isn’t exactly damning.

    9. fhqwhgads*

      Even if it didn’t spell anything, that design is horrendous and looks like a mistake. Logo-on-logo. It looks like a toddler has two Rangers stickers and stacked ’em on top of each other.

    10. MechanicalPencil*

      I’d love either of the Texas teams’ hats. Tetas or Ashos. They’re reselling online for like 1k. I don’t want it that bad.

    2. CTT*

      Just looked up the Atlanta one since they’re the team closest to me and good lord. The Texas one kind of works because it’s all aligned, but the Atlanta hat looks like a manufacturing error. I want one.

      1. epicdemiologist*

        eh, I’d rather have a Rocket City Trash Pandas hat (Huntsville, AL–home of the US Space and Rocket Center–minor league baseball team. Logo is a raccoon in a rocket-propelled trash can)

        1. CTT*

          I don’t even follow baseball and if I did I would get one for my local minor league team, but keeping it on topic, these MLB hats are interesting disasters.

        2. Always Tired*

          My friend collects ridiculous minor/independent league hats. She’s got Rocket City Trash Pandas, Portland Pickles, El Paso Chihuahuas, and Sugar Land Space Cowboys so far. There are some great logos/mascots out there.

        3. Sopranoh*

          My childhood hometown’s minor league team is the Otterbots. I had my parents pick me up a hat because the cyborg otter logo was cute.

        1. Wilbur*

          I don’t know, I could only figure out which one it was by process of elimination. I’m not an expert on branding or marketing, but if someone needs to know the brand to recognize it than you’ve messed up.

          Anyway, Arizonas looks like it says “Arana” or spider in spanish which is tricky because they are the Diamondbacks.

    4. Ms. Whatsit*

      I actually think Toronto’s works, but that’s the only one, and only because it’s obvious what it is (a blue jay), it’s somehow magically both sufficiently covered the name to not be distracting but left enough visible to be clear, and is basically all on one line (sorry, Orioles – your cartoon-style bird over a slantwise script name doesn’t work as well).

      I see someone above saying this is probably the company using AI to create this stuff, which is a bummer. But also, MLB does have this odd thing the last few years of kind of genericizing/universalizing team stuff in a way that I find annoying. Thankfully the All Star game is supposed to go back to players’ own team jerseys. But the post-season sloganeering is so forced. The best things come from the season and the fans – OMG Mets, Snakes Alive Diamondbacks.. As a Red Sox fan, The Idiots, Fear the Beard, and Do Damage – so much better than watching a team I knew wouldn’t get that far wearing shirts that said “We come to reign in October” or what have you.

    5. Personal Best in Consecutive Days Lived*

      I agree; the entire concept of the design is horrible and I’m disappointed I can’t buy the Rangers hat.

    7. some dude*

      It is the worst design choice – to put text on top of text. Even if it isn’t spelling naughty words, it is a hot indecipherable mess.

    8. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

      Where can I go to see them all? I want to see how awful the Chicago ones are!

      1. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

        Never mind! I found the one for the Cubs, and it is indeed stupid looking!

        I didn’t see the White Six one on the MLB site, so I assume they took it down already. Based on the Cubs one, it I can imagine how bad it was.(chiWago, anyone? LOL)

        It’s a really dumb concept, imo, no matter what it spells!

  4. RLC*

    For #1, baseball cap logo, I can’t help but wonder if the design team worked in a bit of a vacuum or with a group of “yes-people” who overlooked any potential misinterpretation of the designs. The Emperor has no clothes – but no one outside the “yes-people” spoke up.

    1. Light Spinner*

      Or they simply didn’t know that “tetas” had any meaning at all! (I didn’t know that until I read the letter a few minutes ago.) I’m not sure that you could totally prevent this kind of thing from happening – you can’t know every single slang word in the world, after all. And since language and slang changes so quickly these days, even Google might not pick up on the very latest obscenity or double entendre! (Although anyone could’ve picked up on that “ASS” hat flub…if that’s what it really was…;)

      1. jtr*

        When I worked at a formerly great company, our division had a team whose job it was to make sure our brand and product names were “internationalized”. We were thisclose to launching a product with a name that apparently meant a “bottom” in a gay sexual relationship in France.

        Also, in the current US climate, I think the guy who came up with the tetas hat design would probably get a promotion rather than fired…

      2. Metal Gru*

        I didn’t know tetas had any meaning, but it is basic common sense that if your design results in a ‘new’ word being created, that you research it before pressing on…

        1. Emmy Noether*

          Even if it didn’t have a meaning, it’s a really stupid design. At first glance I thought it was a typo. It screams “thoughtlessly slapped together without a second look” in any case.

          1. Paint N Drip*

            like all those dumb signs that use shapes in place of letters, but use the absolutely wrong replacement (Welcome FALL with a pumpkin in place of the A)

            1. Phony Genius*

              True story: At the Holland Tunnel, connecting NY and NJ, there’s a sign with giant letters spelling HOLLAND TUNNEL over the toll plaza. Every Christmas, they put two wreaths and a tree-shaped ornament on the sign. (It’s a separate discussion for another day about a public agency spending money on this.) Anyway, they placed the ornaments on the sign paying no attention to the letters. The first wreath went covered the O nicely, but the other was on the U and the tree was on the N making it look like it said HOLAAD TONNAL. One year, the complaints went viral. They ended up spending more money to move the tree over the A and getting rid of the second wreath.

              1. Elizabeth West*

                One of the best signs I ever saw was on the Holland Tunnel. It said, “Clearance 12′ 6″. We mean it!”

                We need one of those on Storrow Drive, lol.

                1. Professional Engineer*

                  I remember that sign! It must not have worked because they changed it to a more standard sign.

                2. Laura*

                  Granted I don’t drive on Storrow every day but I feel like there are plenty of signs! And it’s (in)famous enough that my husband and I were both familiar with “Storrowing” before we ever moved here.

            2. Princess Sparklepony*

              That is definitely no gun in the Sopranos logo.

              You really have to think about replacing letters with objects. Fall with a pumpkin a would read foll to me.

            3. Sharpie*

              There is a PARIS one that uses the Eiffel Tower in place of the R. Rather than replacing a different letter that looks more like the Eiffel Tower when said letter is in its upper case form.

          2. Lacey*

            Yes, I hate the design. I’m not their target audience anyway, but to me this is obviously the kind of thing that ends up in the 75% off clearance section at the end of the year.

          3. Ama*

            The template of the design is that it is whatever wording is on the front of the home uniforms with the normal home hat logo on the front. So yes it’s incredibly lazy in conception and it apparently didn’t occur to anyone that the vast majority of teams have a letter on their home hat in the same font as their unis and overlapping was going to cause legibility issues.

        2. Buni*

          I saw some advice for fantasy/sci-fi writers that pretty much said the same thing – if you’re making up a name for alien or fantastical places / characters, ALWAYS google it first….

      3. Kevin Sours*

        Maybe not. But not running it by someone fluent in Spanish in *Texas* has to be some kind of malpractice

        1. xl*

          I doubt this was done by the actual Texas Rangers team in Texas.

          Every team had a hat with this kind of logo done (including the Anaheim “Anaels”) so it was probably done by MLB in some central location.

          1. Insert Clever Name Here*

            Kevin Sours is pointing out how to make this mistake less likely — sure, have your design is done by someone just trying to make a cool design, but then as part of final review is sent to someone at the Rangers who will have more insight into the context the team exits within its market and you get a better chance for someone to go “uh, that says ‘breasts.’”

          2. Lacey*

            Yeah, this was absolutely done by the MLB and not the Texas Rangers.

            And just based off designing for various corporate entities… somewhere in the MLB there are probably several people who raised this concern and were overruled by someone several levels above them who thought it wasn’t a big deal or that no one would think that. Hopefully they kept the emails.

          3. Cohort1*

            So, AI designed it and the monolingual, underpaid factory workers in China made it. What needs to be fired is the company who put this in motion. Are there actual people in that company? Fire them too.

        2. bamcheeks*

          Yeah, if you’d published something that was a slang word in, like, Lithuanian, that would be one thing.But if you didn’t have a Spanish speaker anywhere on your team — uhh, maybe time to consider a DEI hire?

          1. Snow Globe*

            And this is Texas! Even English speakers in Texas would know enough Spanish to recognize that. They probably thought is was funny.

            1. Unauthorized Plants*

              Greetings from Texas! I speak almost no Spanish and context clues alone were enough to get it. (It is funny but also I’m not sure how seeing someone wearing this hat would hit me, tbh. Probably would depend on context)

              1. RC*

                I feel like it would hit me like those “FBI” spring break shirts, so …not great.

                It’s mostly hilarious how they couldn’t find anyone to do a very basic language check for a pretty common language in their market (and.. also in baseball in general?). There was even a telenovela several years back called “Sin Tetas No Hay Paraíso” (she thinks a boob job will fix her life; spoilers, it does not. it’s actually a pretty good telenovela though) and when they remade it from Colombian to the US market, they changed the title to “Sin Senos…” because tetas was too vulgar a term for them.

                1. JustaTech*

                  Yeah, the variations in Spanish in North, Central and South America is huge. My cousin, in Texas, named her dogs something perfectly normal in Spanish. Well, it was fine in Texas, but when she moved to Chile she discovered that there, her dogs were named, essentially “D*ck” and “P*ssy”.
                  It’s very hard to change your dog’s names!

            2. LaurCha*

              For real. I’m an Anglo who lived in Texas for all of 5 years and I know what tetas means. It’s not exactly obscure.

          2. juliebulie*

            I’m not sure why “Tetas” would be acceptable even if it didn’t mean titties. “Tetas” is neither the name of the state nor the team. It’s just, I’m sorry, stupid and not clever.

        4. Mark This Confidential And Leave It Laying Around*

          This! Nothing says “Made in China” like unintended Spaish slang in Texas! I did work somewhere that made a similar mistake and yes, some people lost their jobs. It was a very expensive mistake, yes, but the biggest factor in the firings was that these people were told and either didn’t take it seriously or thought it was funny.

      4. Roland*

        I don’t think designers need to know Spanish-language slang, but it’s absurd for the MLB specificly not to have someone who can sign off designs to confirm “this will not be offensive/unintentionally-hilarious to our huge Hispanic audience”

      5. DJ Abbott*

        It’s close enough to the American slang word, – “tits, titties” that it’s the first thing I thought of.

        1. Nack*

          or tatas! Which I’ve seen used by Breast Cancer Awareness programs so I imagine many people are familiar with the term.

      6. Chirpy*

        Yeah, but this one was obvious even to a northerner like me, because I took Spanish in 7th grade when even pre-internet the boys were able to find out a bunch of Spanish swears. “Tetas” is not new.

      7. T.N.H*

        This is exactly what AI should be used for. The right tool could easily check every hat for errors and would know Tetas.

        1. Peanut Hamper*

          Why use AI when you could just do a web search for “tetas”.

          Good lord, not everything has to be run through AI.

        2. Jackalope*

          If you read above, the problem is that the design was made by AI and didn’t have a human sign off on it. So AI is in fact the exact wrong tool for this unless you intend to make this sort of mistake.

          1. T.N.H*

            The design tool and the QA tool should not be the same. They wouldn’t be the same person though either. An AI would be much more likely to catch these than a person who won’t know as much slang.

            1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

              No. A culturally competent person in TEXAS could catch this on a minute. Even if you wanted automation, an old-fashioned lookup of dirty words in languages spoken in the area would be far better and cheaper than bringing in AI.

        3. wordswords*

          Or… human beings? Having a human glance over all the designs will catch this and a lot more problems as well. Yes, not everyone speaks Spanish, but for something as large-scale as this and for a region like Texas in particular, it seems like basic common sense to have a Spanish speaker look over your content to catch stuff like that. Plus, humans are going to be a lot better than AI at detecting when something theoretically says X but could be read as Y (this also includes the A’s hat mentioned earlier).

          I can understand building in some kind of computerized check against a master list of offensive words in numerous languages, and even using something algorithmic to compile that list (maybe), but there is zero reason to use the resources AI demands to do this check that a human can do quickly and much better.

      8. Dust Bunny*

        It’s always a good idea to run stuff through a search engine to double-check that it doesn’t mean something awkward in another language, especially if that language is also common in your country.

      9. Elitist Semicolon*

        Given how many of the other ones can also be read as anatomical slang, I have a hard time believing Fanatics didn’t do it on purpose.

      11. JB*

        But this is a team based out of Texas and it’s a common word in Spanish. So common that we have some English loan words based on it.

        It’s not like this is some obscure Belarusian slang hahaha over 25% of Texas’ population speaks Spanish.

      12. InsufficentlySubordinate*

        You could if they had actual put the Rangers instead of Texas and then imposed the T over it. What’s up with putting the state instead of the actual mascot?

    2. Witch of Oz*

      Google translation fails for a LONG list of companies and products which made similar mistakes.

      1. allathian*

        US car manufacturers are/were particularly bad at this. They excel at picking vaguely Spanish sounding brand names that actually mean something, often the meaning is at least slightly offensive. The mildest I can think of is Chevrolet Nova (sounds like “no va,” it doesn’t go).

        1. Alicent*

          The Nova thing is an urban legend. There was a Mexican gasoline brand “Nova” so the whole idea was a bit silly.

          1. Katie A*

            Exactly! It actually sold pretty well.

            “nova” and “no va” aren’t pronounced the same. One comparison I saw is that you wouldn’t think a dining room set didn’t have a table if the brand name was “notable” just because that’s the same letters in the same order as “no table”.

        2. Kowalski! Options!*

          To be fair, they don’t corner the market on that kind of thing. Mitsubishi tried to sell the Pajero in Europe without realizing that, in Spain, “pajero” means “wanker”, and had to rebrand it as the “Montero”.

      2. metadata minion*

        This is why a professional company shouldn’t use Google Translate! They’re not going to be able to catch *all* slang in all languages, but if you’re producing something for a Texas market, it’s worth the cost of hiring a Spanish translator to spend 10 minutes looking at your logo and tell you if it means “tits”.

        1. Lexi Vipond*

          I was confused by that at first, but I think Witch of Oz meant that people should google the string ‘translation fails’

    3. Antilles*

      No, because there’s one important piece of context here: Every single team had a cap like this, where they just bring-to-front the team’s logo on top of the name.
      So what happened is not “group of yes-men”, but rather that they designed it for one teams as a model, got approval on that model, then they just rolled it out to all 30 teams without further discussion.
      In case you’re wondering, all of them look horrible. TeTas may be the only one that forms a vulgar word, but DoLAers and BraAes and AnAels and the rest are also dumb.

      1. Edwina*

        I agree, it’s an unattractive design that looks like someone with zero design knowledge created it.

      2. AFac*

        Given the Dodgers payroll and free agent signings this year, DoLAers sounds appropriate, if misspelled.

        And I say this as a Dodgers fan.

    4. DE*

      I doubt it was that. All 30 hats are identical. They made one design and copy-pasted it. They just didn’t look very closely at the final result.

    5. librarian*

      I feel that they definitely did not have anyone with any knowledge of Spanish on the team! Otherwise it would not have made it through. I’m not fluent at all but I do have a background with the language and I would have caught it, but if no one else has that background, it would have slipped through.

      2. OaDC*

        About 30% of Major League Baseball players are Latino/Hispanic and I feel confident every MLB team office has multiple Spanish speakers. In fact, MLB rules require each team to have two Spanish speaking interpreters. Whether they had a diverse group review the design, or anyone at all review the design is a different question, but saying “they definitely did not have anyone with any knowledge of Spanish on the team” is ludicrous in Major League Baseball.

    6. Dek*

      Someone said upthread that they’re all AI designed. So there is not “design team.”

      Because we live in a stupid, stupid world.

    7. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

      Also a sign that the league and the team should make a point of hiring more people who speak colloquial Spanish, given the huge popularity of MLB among Spanish-speaking populations.

    8. el l*

      I bet there are many people who could’ve theoretically caught this but didn’t. Should they be fired as well? (No)

      As for firing on one big mistake: Let they who are without sin cast the first stone.

    9. toolegittoresign*

      Because this is a design being used across several teams, it seems like even if you knew this might be an issue, it may lead to a sunk cost discussion where oh so because some people might giggle about the Texas hat we have to abandon the whole concept?”
      I could get it being seen as a “mistake” if it were only this team with the design concept but this was done for a lot of teams, it just looks the worst for Texas.

    10. It's an intern*

      My company works with the Rangers and has for decades.

      In the past two years, interns or brand-new grads have been put in charge of large and important departments. It’s been so bad that we are about two steps away from dropping them.

    2. Jackalope*

      I will confess that that was my thought too. Went near there with some French friends and had a hard time not giggling to myself like a middle schooler.

  6. Artemesia*

    an oak leaf with acorns can be fairly salacious looking if designed with an abstract flair as I observed at a former employer; I always wonder about who signs off on graphics — you would think looking for this sort of thing would be a standard on the checklist – so you would not get the Texas TeTas or the Oakland Ass hat — but apparently not.

    1. Bagpuss*

      I think it’s possible that things are checked but not picked up on – for instnace if you *know* it’s an oak leaf then you amy not ‘see’ the alternative. So even with aulioty control things can slip through

      1. Dek*

        Thinking about the recent yearbook at my school. The cover is a man in a canoe.

        It…um. Yeah, someone should’ve caught that.

    3. Snackmonster*

      I have teenagers and I learned VERY quickly that I needed to be evaluating everything with a “can this be made inappropriate” filter. Because if there is even a whiff of that they will run with it. Currently on a “Bofa” and “deez nutz” streak and can’t wait to be done with those jokes made under their breath. Maybe they should hire a teenager because they will immediately catch it.

      1. MsM*

        My husband firmly believes every marketing department should have a focus group of 12 year olds on standby. If they start laughing, whatever it is goes back to the drawing board.

    4. PhyllisB*

      Also palmetto leaves. When I was in South Carolina for a wedding I bought my hubby a baseball cap with a palmetto design on the front.
      He got so many comments from people about how “cool” it was that he was a pot smoker and didn’t minadvertising it. (If you knew us you would understand how funny that was. We’re about as far from that as you can get.) Hat got retired.

      1. epicdemiologist*

        I’m reminded of the time my sister planted okra in her front garden and one of her neighbors called the cops & said she was growing marijuana. Cops didn’t even get out of the car, just turned around in the cul-de-sac and drove off laughing.

    6. RagingADHD*

      There’s also things that many people wouldn’t necessarily see, but once it’s mentioned, you can’t unsee it.

      A former employer undertook a redesign that kept their established brand colors (black, gray, and red) and added a kind of abstract gray and white checkerboard rectangle with one red square, along with a tagline about being “there for you — always.” I think the logo was supposed to suggest a “ready” light – that we were ready to help when everyone else was busy / asleep?

      One of the people I supported was coordinating with the design firm, and was very proud of this new redesign. He took it around to all the other execs on the hallway and came back absolutely crushed when one guy immediately pointed out the association with a red spot in the middle of a white rectangle, and the Always maxi-pad brand.

      I didn’t notice it myself at first, but all it takes is one person to make the association, and from then on that rectangle will forever look like a maxi-pad.

      1. Grandma*

        One such example of current interest is the Tesla logo. Every time I see it, I see a pair of fallopian tubes and a uterus. Was that really unintentional? I’m not convinced.

        1. Freya*

          I always see an IUD in the Tesla logo. Because it looks like the diagrams of an IUD up against the top wall of the uterus.

    7. Smithy*

      A while back, a number of German agencies went through a reorganization, and one department received the name, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit but came out with all their logo work around their initials – GIZ.

      While I entirely get a non-English team not making it to the levels of English slang – where it’s not even spelled the same but brings to mind the pronunciation of salacious slang. However, among English speakers in the field – it’s always been referred to by saying the letters individually as opposed to other development office acronyms like SIDA. And even among Americans I know, instead of pronouncing Z as “zee” it’ll regularly be said “gee, eye, zed”.

      All to say – I think once you get into this territory – it feels like these moments that do make it through are just that much more memorable.

    8. Can't Sit Still*

      I once delayed a marketing campaign when I burst out laughing looking at a poster pending final approval. It was a very bland and innocuous ad that showed the product and who it was being marketed to and why, but the device was highlighted in such a way to make it appear to be a very different sort of product at first glance.

      Once I saw it, everyone saw it, no one could stop laughing, and the design team had to go back to the drawing board.

  7. Crencestre*

    #3: Several years ago, I worked at a nonprofit which had a prize drawing during our yearly holiday party; every attendee was given a ticket. I saw several of the top executives quietly putting their tickets back into the “hat” so that even if their number was drawn, no one would answer and another ticket would be pulled out instead.

    The prizes went to staff members who could really use them, and for whom they’d be a real treat – not something that they themselves could easily afford. I’ve always thought that this was a tactful and thoughtful way for those executives to ensure that the scenario that OP3 described would NOT happen to them!

    1. Cupcakes for days*

      I’m in retail and when people get promoted into management one of the first conversations we have is that they’re no longer eligible for most raffles or winning big contest prizes and we talk about the whys and optics behind it. Low stakes things like ‘everyone who completes X gets Y’ everyone including management gets to participate in. Raffling off Z amount of product usually includes temporary and part time management unless it’s $$$. Including them in part of the fun (drawing names, contacting winners) helps too.

      1. Jason*

        I’m in upper management and I *always* enter raffles because they are fun. When I have won I prize, I go up and loudly declare “Thanks for rigging it for me!” and then put it back and ask them to draw again.

    2. Productivity Pigeon*

      That’s how you do it!

      Just like you should leave the holiday party early if you’re a manager and let the staff enjoy themselves.

      My Big4 consultancy even sent out notices to anyone above the rank of manager specifically instructing them to go home at say 9 or 10pm.

      1. PartyTime*

        What the what?!?

        Part of the point of the holiday party is to give lower level folks the chance to interact with folks higher up the ladder they don’t see much if at all in day to day work. Attendance and staying until the very end has been expected everywhere I work (it may or may not have been explicitly required, but it was definitely the expected norm). I know folks who spent time before the event trying to figure out who they wanted to talk to at the party and if they wanted to make sure they had time for a real convo or were just trying to remind the bigwig they existed.

        2. Productivity Pigeon*

          The bosses still went to the party, they just didn’t stay until the bar closed.
          Plenty of time for interacting before they needed to leave. :)

          1. Charlotte Lucas*

            My sister worked at a law firm where there would be a point in firm happy hours that the partner she supported would give her his credit card to settle the tab, and all the partners would leave to let people relax and enjoy themselves more naturally.

            1. Productivity Pigeon*

              Yeah, I know when we went to a ski conference, the partners retreated to a private suite or villa, can’t remember, after a certain amount of time.

        3. Ellis Bell*

          Not everywhere, I’ve definitely worked in places where the boss ducks out after the main event so people can relax. I’ve worked in the reverse expectation as well though. I noticed the rule of bowing out seemed to apply on the reality show Below Deck, as well. The captain didn’t join them on their usual nights out, but at the end of a season the captain would take the team out for dinner, chat over the food, pay for dinner and then leave, letting the crew go out without them.

        4. KateM*

          Did you notice the “go home” time was set at 9 or 10 pm? What kind of work parties did you have where people were expected to stay past 10 pm??

          1. PartyTime*

            If it was an annual party at a hotel, it often didn’t start until 8pm and most people didn’t show up until at least 9pm. I would leave around midnight with the party still going full bore because public transportation was shutting down. Many people booked rooms at the hotel at a discounted rate negotiated by the company as part of their event package then partied until who knows when.

            I don’t think I’ve ever been to an evening work event that ended before midnight. If so, it certainly was in the minority.

            1. Productivity Pigeon*

              That might be a cultural difference. I live in Sweden, and we’re not like Spain or France when dinner starts at 8pm.

              Our work parties usually started at 5pm or so.

              1. I'm just here for the cats!!*

                It’s not just a cultural difference I think it’s also industry specific. I’ve never had a work party that was not during or right after work hours. I do remember a few times where my mom’s work had a holiday party that was later. But she worked as a caregiver at a disability center, so they would have to wait until all the clients were away.

        5. The Cosmic Avenger*

          I think it’s heavily dependent on context. A big firm like Productivity Pigeon mentions, I can see it. My small company (100-400 people during most of my tenure), the officers (who founded the company) stuck around and tried to talk to everyone, and I really did like having them around.

    3. Paint N Drip*

      Alternately, the last time I joined my husband at a workplace holiday party, they had some party games with prizes varying from a giftcard for dinner to big money electronics – his manager (one of the top 5 or 6 people in the ~150-person company) was aggressively shouldering into every game getting visibly angrier each time someone else won. My husband was drunkenly oblivious after he won a game and chose a huge TV (which is putting a wrench in my living room aesthetics to this day) and then got a short schedule the next couple weeks LOL

    4. iglwif*

      When I worked at an organization that had door prizes at the annual holiday party, members of senior management were explicitly NOT given raffle tickets. The process you describe would work just as well as long as all the relevant people are doing the right thing.

      Whichever way you do it, I think it’s super important to staff morale for those prizes to go to literally anyone but senior management!

    5. theonceandfuturegrantwriter*

      The execs at a nonprofit I worked for would enter raffles but put down the names of junior employees on their raffle tickets, quietly buying extra entries for lower-paid, younger staff. I always thought that was classy.

      Conversely, a board member who had repeatedly and loudly protested the organization’s decision to hold the fundraising raffle and boycotted selling tickets ended up winning a $2000 grand cash prize. He gave back $500 and kept the rest. The raffle actually lost money. I did not think that was classy at all.

  8. Kevin Sours*

    I firmly believe that with a mistake of this sort there has to be at least one person who noticed and thought it would be funny.

    1. Audrey Puffins*

      This is 100% the case. Different scale, different impact, but same energy: I fix every single typo I see at work, apart from two (in internal documents) that amuse me to leave exactly as they are (one because of who made the error, the other because of what it reminds me of). There’s even the possibility that most of them *did* notice in this case but figured they’d get some amusedly scandalised publicity and some sales to people who wouldn’t buy a less cheeky design

    2. Juicebox Hero*

      When I first saw it, I thought it was deliberate, in the style of the “save the ta-tas” breast cancer awareness wristbands that were popular a while ago.

    3. PenguinWrangler*

      Or did it deliberately, when I was an architecture intern working on renderings I used to hide celebrities among the scale figures and memes in the picture frames.

    4. EvilQueenRegina*

      Considering yesterday’s post on giving the big F You to old jobs, I’m now picturing someone who was leaving and thought it would be their grand gesture to pretend not to have noticed in the hope that this happened.

    5. fhqwhgads*

      Or it was just malicious compliance. Seems like this line of hats is pretty much teams single image logo over teams verbal logo. So to have this “style” at all, means putting the T in the middle. For all we know someone said “hey so…when we do that, it ends up this way…” and whoever above them was like “no, we’re doing the logo in the middle on top of the other logo, just like all the others.”

  9. Leenie*

    The Tetas thing is a real life example of how DEI initiatives benefit companies in practical ways, and aren’t just altruistic, feel-good endeavors. Having different perspectives and different experiences informing decision-making is a valuable thing. Helps avoid tunnel vision and unforced errors (to use an appropriately sportsy metaphor).

    2. Smithy*

      While I agree broadly speaking – given what happened with the Angels, Oakland A’s, and Houston Astros – to me this speaks more of over relying on AI/ChatGPT.

      Or perhaps relying on non-English and non-Spanish speakers being the only ones involved in production, and higher level staff who do speak English and/or Spanish not actually looking at each hat.

        1. Smithy*

          While having no one that spoke Spanish who could speak up and say “this is rude” – there was apparently also no one that spoke English who could speak up and point that out for the Astros, Angels and A’s.

          It could be an outsourcing issue where the entire production was done in a country like China, without more sophisticated English/Spanish speakers when it came to slang. But then at some point, this did make it’s way to the US. And while there could have been a complete absence of Spanish speakers, I find it highly unlikely that there were both no English and Spanish speakers at MLB reviewing this. And English is all you need to see the issues with the Astros, Angels and A’s.

      2. This Old House*

        The thing is, the hats are not actually consistent like the original letter implied. It’s not all “Logo over location” – maybe I don’t know enough about using AI, but didn’t *someone* have to input somewhere that the Mets hat would be their NY over “New York” (location) while the Yankees hat would be their own NY over “Yankees” (team name)? Some are over locations, some are over team names or nicknames, and the Colorado Rockies is literally over the full phrase “Colorado Rockies.” If someone actively decided not to put that T over “Rangers” because then it would say “RanTers,” but didn’t realize that “TeTas” also spelled something, that would seem to be a specific failure of cultural/linguistic awareness.

        1. KitKat*

          It looks to me like primary logo over secondary, or logo over word mark. They’re all real logos for the teams, the parts that are words spelled out are still specific designs used one uniforms and stuff

      3. RVA Cat*

        Remember the lawsuit about a Chinese-made brown couch with an offensive label? Note it was a Black customer who sued.

    3. Massive Dynamic*

      YUP – just ONE Spanish-speaking human in the design approval mix would’ve shut that down.

  10. Witch of Oz*

    Re the Texas hat debacle.
    Many years ago I attended a work-related talk. The speaker outlined a situation in which someone had made a costly mistake. When someone questioned why the person wasn’t fired, the manager said, “Why would I fire him? I’ve just put 40k towards his training!”

    2. Love to WFH*

      In IT, people make mistakes that lose data, crash websites, and so on.

      There is a cultural value in many companies that “it can happen to anyone”, and that we need to look for the failure in the process that let it happen.

      Beware the company that says “the intern did it” and never work there!

      1. just tired*

        I would love to know what happened to that person that caused the blue screen of death on every work computer last year? That was the most disruptive thing I ever saw.

        1. Strive to Excel*

          The Cloudstrike crash? Unfortunately the people who were probably fired are not the ones who caused the problem. The company has a consistent history of departing employees reporting problems with lean staffing, insufficient QA testing, rushed deadlines, the whole predictable lot. Cloudstrike of course claims it’s just disgruntled employees complaining after being fired.

        2. JB*

          If an error like that gets rolled out live, the issue is almost not certainly with whoever made the actual error. Again, it’s an issue with the entire process.

          Let’s say there’s an intern who’s put in charge of creating an ad for a company. They’re still learning workplace norms and they stick some strong language in there – something that to them sounds jazzy and emphatic. Two days later, that ad prints in a local newspaper, and only then does the company owner see that the ad described their product as “kick-ass” and “bitchin'”.

          Whose fault is this? Hint: it’s not the intern’s.

          1. Coverage Associate*

            This is sort of a plot line in the novel “Murder Must Advertise,” and shows how these things came up even in the 1930s. Basically the text advertising team didn’t coordinate with the illustration advertising team, and text that worked on its own was risqué next to the illustration. The printer caught it, and the one advertising guy still late at the office had to provide a new text on the spot, even though these things usually took a week and multiple rounds of review.

            I don’t think they learned to coordinate the text and illustration teams though, in the novel. (These aren’t major spoilers.)

            1. Strive to Excel*

              Oh no, it’s even better – the one guy at the office was pretty sure that the supervisor supposed to catch it *did* and thought it was funny so let it through anyways.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        The higher the stakes, the more important it is to have a culture where you look at processes and root causes rather than just firing the person who made the mistake. When lives are on the line, you *need* to have employees willing to say, “Everyone stop for a minute, I’m not sure I checked the jet fuel quality” or “I may have left some gauze in when I sewed up the patient after their operation” or “I know we’re on a tight deadline, but could someone make sure my tests are testing the correct things before we release this medical devices update?”

        If your culture rewards people who admit mistakes, quality and safety improves. If you fire them, people die.

    3. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Oh, that’s brilliant. At my last job, my boss had accidentally sent a large bank transfer to a fraudulent company and thus was *extremely* careful going forward to check that all EFTs were legit, which had the effect of also making me extremely careful about such things. A pricey mistake, sure, but one we likely wouldn’t make a second time.

    4. Antilles*

      Good attitude. Especially since it’s quite rare for a mistake to truly be just one person’s fault.
      Did we have an appropriate level of internal review? Was the employee qualified for this task in the first place or did we assign it to the wrong person? Did we have enough support available? Is the mistake something where we’ve been rolling the dice for years but just this time we happened to roll snake eyes? What processes should have existed to catch this before it went to the client?
      Maybe after reviewing the situation, you still decide that the employee should be fired (e.g., if you had appropriate protocols and he flagrantly ignored them), but typically the companies who just “fire him immediately!” ignore the entire rest of the process and therefore learn nothing from the mistake.

      1. Coverage Associate*

        Yes, with the hat in OP, anyone who was fired, if anyone was, was probably a scapegoat.

        The data security examples here are interesting, because I don’t think someone should be fired for falling to a phishing scam, we have seen big data breaches that were one person skipping multi factor authentication or VPN, and those need to be company policies where you can be fired for one mistake, depending on the level of the person who made the mistake and the sensitivity of the data they had access to.

  11. Productivity Pigeon*

    LW#4:

    I think you’re overthinking this a bit, especially since it sounds like you have an ”obvious” nickname, like Jimmy for James or something similar.

    I once had a colleague who was called Eric but who used the nickname ”Buster”. It was his company email handle and everything!

    My name is Cecilia but I go by Cissi, which is the most common nickname for Cecilia in my country.
    I still use Cecilia formally (and in my email) but I’m rarely called it. My Facebook name is Cissi LastName and so on.
    But when I first started working after college, I wasn’t sure if it was professional to just use my nickname even though I never feel quite like myself when someone calls me Cecilia.

    Luckily, there were THREE other Cecilias in my team of about 30-40 people, (Don’t ask me why, it’s not that popular a name), one who was my manager!
    And they were all called Cissi as well!

    It still took me a while to work up the courage to ask my grandbosses to use my nickname. I was worried they’d think I was being too familiar. (LW#4, like you, I overthink things!)

    1. Op4/Annie*

      i definitely am overthinking it a little bit haha — I tend to overthink things in general, but I think I’m gonna switch my name in my email signature over to annie in the next day or two! I agree that having a pretty obvious nickname and not something super offbeat makes it easier

      1. ecnaseener*

        It sounds like you might not have a lot of meetings since you’re only making the change in your email signature, but if you have the chance to say out loud “By the way, I’m going to start going by Annie,” people will be much more likely to start using it. I don’t know how long it would take me to notice a coworker’s signature changing — I don’t reread their signatures most of the time!

        1. op4/Annie*

          you’re right, i very rarely have meetings. my job is pretty email-based with maybe 2-4 virtual meetings a year, which is why it felt less natural to me to switch it. not sure if i’ll have the chance to speak in today’s meeting (we do actually have one of our rare zoom meetings this afternoon haha), but if i do i’ll say smth to that effect!

      2. Antilles*

        Honestly, even if your nickname wasn’t so obvious and linked to your ‘formal’ name, you’d still be fine.
        At my first job, we had someone who worked there for a couple years, then decided to start going by his totally different middle name instead, think of going from “John” to “Robert”. Was totally fine, people just adjusted and kept right on going, nobody blinked an eye. Occasionally someone who knew him by “John” would either not yet know of the name change or just brain-fart forget, but they’d just apologize, John/Robert would gracefully shrug it off, and that was that.

        1. Grimalkin*

          As someone who’s considered a similar name change, this is very reassuring to read! Thank you!

      3. Sandra/Sandy*

        Honestly I’m surprised no one has started calling you Annie on their own! I always introduce myself as my full name and use it in correspondence but everyone immediately defaults to the shorter version (which is fine).

        I often add the short version as a friendly/more informal sign-off in emails with people i know:

        Thanks Will, talk soon
        ~Sandy

        Sandra Lastname
        Senior Cat Herder
        Felix LLC

    2. Dust Bunny*

      I spent yesterday morning doing some work at [organization distantly related to ours]: Their chief of security is [so and so] Holliday. He goes by Doc.

      I don’t think this would really be that weird, though, to change to a nickname.

      1. Productivity Pigeon*

        Plus people change their last names all the time when they get married and that goes without a hitch.

    3. Archi-detect*

      There is a guy in one if our Southern offices that goes by Tater. When I email him, I just use sir lol

  12. Irish Teacher.*

    LW1, this is just my opinion but I generally don’t think how public something is should play a part in the response. Firing isn’t a punishment or a way to get back at somebody. It’s getting rid of somebody who either can’t do the job or who is a liability for whatever reason. I think the main reason for firing somebody for a mistake would be if you think the person is likely to continue making such mistakes.

    There can be an exception is the mistake causes such offence that the company wants to make it clear they are not associated with it.

  13. Glen*

    reminds me of going to a trade school where an instructor had to tell one of my classmates he had to get a new email, as his current one – along the lines of “ballmaster69@hotmail.com” (can’t remember what it actually was but definitely along those general lines) was inappropriate. In fairness to the guy he was a kid straight out of high school, but still pretty surprising when people need to be told that sort of thing isn’t okay!

    1. Mrs. Pommeroy*

      Trade school, college and uni are the perfect places to be taught those things, though. During my freshers’ week at uni we had one professor give a talk on basic professional norms to keep in mind, and what constitutes an appropriate email address was a part of that. I really appreciated that talk because it made the rules clear to everyone and didn’t judge someone for not already knowing.

      1. Good Enough For Government Work*

        I would have loved one of these talks when I started at uni. I’m only the second person in my family to complete a university degree, and I went all four years awkwardly fudging things because I didn’t know how I should address lecturers, didn’t really know what office hours were for and assumed they were only for serious issues, and so on.

    2. bamcheeks*

      My favourite example of this was the time I had to tell a new graduate that it was better to use his FirstName.LastName email and not his dj_bmx_bad_boy@ one, and DEFINITELY not to use the flashing animated cyan, magenta and yellow email signature advertising his DJ skills when applying for an accountancy job.

      1. Tiny Clay Insects*

        I am crining thinking of my first semester in grad school, when I was teaching a lab. My students all had my university email already, but I also gave them my personal one “since I don’t check the other one as often” and it was rbf4eva (Reel Big Fish, the 90s ska band, forever) at Hotmail. Nothing offensive but still embarrassing to look back on.

        1. Leenie*

          That’s funny. Also funny that at some point after the 90’s, that would absolutely be read as Resting Bit*h Face Forever.

        2. Bookish Person*

          Don’t worry too much, I had a full fledged tenured professor who told us (a 150+ lecture hall no less) to use her personal email over the university provided one and it was something like beastmistress[numbers]@whatever. She claimed that it was because she had a lot of pets.

          She was one of the “I’m not tech savvy at all!” types whose TA’s where attempting to drag her into the 21 century by converting her overhead projector transparencies into PowerPoint slides for her (which she was always excited and amazed when they worked) and the TAs also had to work the lecture hall’s light switches so I guess it was just par for the course, lol. I do wonder if the university cracked down on the personal email thing eventually or just shrugged it off as professors are going be professors.

    3. Parrhesia25*

      I used to work in a call center and one of the clients required us to verify people’s email. Names and emails changed to protect the innocent.

      Me: And can I confirm that your email is “fluffy_bunnies_and_rainbows@nomail.com”?
      Caller: Yes
      Beat
      Caller: I really need to get a grown-up email address.

      1. RVA Cat*

        So about 20 years ago there was a mini-scandal in my (mid-sized, state capital) city when it became public that the *sheriff* was using her personal email “MissBuns” for official business.

    4. New Jack Karyn*

      I’m a high school teacher, and work with a focus group of students weekly. I make sure the 11th and 12th graders all have non-school emails that are appropriate for work.

  14. Kate, short for Bob*

    LW2 this whole situation sounds full of bees – if she’s that unprofessional, she may salt the earth for you with her coworkers before you start. And the company may be bringing on a new manager in the hopes they’ll manage her out because they’ve noticed she’s a problem, not thinking about the optics of that to the rest of the team.

    Based on what you’ve said, I can’t think of a scenario where this goes well unless she’s had a major awakening over the last year.

    1. learnedthehardway*

      I think the only way it works is if the OP discloses the situation to the hiring manager (in the very same super-concise, no details way Allison suggestions), and the hiring manager reads between the lines and has had similar concerns about the team member.

      It might be best to withdraw from the process – the whole thing sounds like a headache.

      1. OP2*

        Thank you both and Alison! I hadn’t even thought that she would cause issues for me either but tbh she absolutely would. If she even knew I was applying I’m sure she would say something about me, she’s had no issues embarrassing me to my face in the past. Sounds like I have to let this one go.

  15. DJ Abbott*

    #5, I would change Alison’s suggested wording a little. I have known people who would be offended at the implication they might be confused. My current manager might take offense at this. And she wouldn’t tell me at the time, she would wait till later and make A Thing of it, and bring it up several times…
    Anyway, I would leave off the part about being confused and say just say “… I changed my email signature.”

  16. annie*

    #4 is exactly Anne Hathaway’s situation! I definitely remember her telling it in some interview

    1. Op4/Annie*

      i love Anne Hathaway and when I saw that interview I felt such a kinship with her lmao

    2. Clara*

      I mean it hasn’t caught on for her! She said hearing “Anne Hathaway” makes her feel like she is in trouble but no one public calls her Annie.

  17. Irish Teacher.*

    Something like Anne or Annie is similar enough that I doubt it would cause any comment at all. I think it’s common enough for people to use their more formal name at first and for people to start using their nickname as they get to know them better.

    To be honest, I’d say the main difficulty here is that people might not even notice the change. Anne to Annie in an e-mail signature might not even register as changed to people.

    If it was a bigger change, like you wanted people start calling you by your middle name, I think it would still be fine to do but it might take people a bit longer to get used to, whereas changing to calling you Annie after a year is completely normal and unremarkable.

    1. Op4/Annie*

      yeah that’s what I was thinking — it’s just a single letter odd so it might take people a minute to notice. I don’t mind being called anne, but I do def prefer annie

  18. Kelly Leventhal*

    For #1 It wasn’t just Texas that had questionable hats. There were several that had words that could be misconstrued, including Houston Astros and Los Angeles Angels.

      1. Leenie*

        I think it’s funny that the team that infamously cheated at the World Series has a hat that essentially calls them assholes. I feel like a lot of Dodgers fans might have bought those.

    2. Juicebox Hero*

      It works all right for something like the Orioles, where the logo is a cartoon bird. But most MLB logos are stylized letters, and plonking a giant letter in the middle off a name automatically makes you want to read it as a nonsense (or dirty) word. Apparently I’m now a PhiPies fan…

    3. Sneaky Squirrel*

      This was a poor design choice all around considering that most of the teams have a logo that consists of one or two letters. Many of them read like misspellings. And it’s visually difficult to read a few of them where it’s a letter imposed on top of a letter imposed on top of another letter (Padres and San Francisco, for example).

  19. Apex Mountain*

    #2 just sounds like a setup for failure. If you’re feeling this strongly about her lack of professionalism it might be tough to get around it. Also, consider how it must feel from the former friend’s perspective (“this person who can’t stand me is about to be my boss!”)

    Maybe you can get past it – if you worked together at your toxic workplace, well that can warp anyone…could be she’s back to normal now.

  20. Hyaline*

    It kinda feels like when companies do decide to fire someone (especially if it’s one person) in situations like #1 that it’s basically just scapegoating. There’s no way it’s only one person’s mistake and plenty of people signed off, so finding one person to fire feels arbitrary and toxic—Queen of Hearts style management.

  21. Oolie*

    I worked with an engineer whose first name was Harold. People often assumed he went by “Harry,” which he might have, except that he came from a part of the country where that name is pronounced “hairy,” and his last name was a noun that was something that definitely should not be hairy, let’s say, “Pitts.” So he went by a completely unrelated nickname, let’s say, “Chip.” Since his professional engineer’s license was under his legal name, his go-to signature was “Harold A. Pitts, P.E. (Chip).” And if anyone called him Harry, he’d laugh and say, “Hairy Pitts doesn’t really work for me; please call me Chip.” Throwing your preferred name in parentheses with your legal name is a good way to cover both legal/certification needs and everyday use needs. And it’s a common enough convention that most people will get it without further explanation.

        1. Bella Ridley*

          There will probably now be a 30-comment derailment on how everyone pronounces these words, but suffice it to say this is not universal.

          1. Paint N Drip*

            to start it off, agreed – for me, ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘hairy toes’ both start with the same sounds

      3. ecnaseener*

        Yep, you can look up “marry merry Mary” for more info if you’re curious! Some accents pronounce all 3 differently, some pronounce all 3 the same, some pronounce two of them the same (which two varies).

        1. Pescadero*

          Yep… the Mary–marry–merry merger.

          The full Mary–marry–merry merger is common throughout much of the United States . It is found in about 57% of American English speakers.

          No merger exists primarily in the Northeastern United States – in the accents of Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York City, Rhode Island, and Boston. Philadelphia does tend to have the merry–Murray merger.

          The Mary–marry merger: 16% of American English speakers, highest concentration in New England.

          The Mary–merry merger: 9% of American English speakers overall, concentrated in the American South

    3. SprawledOut*

      That just reminds me of my elementary school principal, Richard Dich (pronounced as a hard K sound, not as a CH). He did, unfortunately, go by Dick to the office staff instead of Rich or Richard. He also named his son Harold, and did use Harry as a nickname for him. He even gave one or two speeches at assembly mentioning his own son by name.

      Props to him, though, he either had skin made of adamantium, an amazing sense of humor about it, or the patience of a saint, because the smothered laughs of a school full of children never seemed to bother him!

      1. A Simple Narwhal*

        My husband had a guidance counselor in middle school named Richard Semen who went by Dick. I imagine he must have been insanely strong or cool to get away with it!

  22. Cabbagepants*

    #3 my company has a similar raffle at our annual holiday party. One key difference is that when your name is drawn, you can take any prize. I highly recommend this method! Makes it more exciting to see what people choose,and much higher chance that the lucky winners get something they’d like. And in the scenario like in #3, the senior manager could pick a book by a speaker and leave the big screen TV for the next person.

    1. Scarlet ribbons in her hair*

      Yes, he/she/they could pick a book by a speaker, but how can you be sure that they would?

  23. Retired Now*

    I was once the manager for a very large trade show with a strict policy stating that employees are not eligible to win prizes from the vendors. During the show, I was chatting with a vendor about one of their products and said I would be stopping by their brick and mortar shop to purchase said item. Fast forward to the last hours of the show and my event staff made an announcement over the loudspeaker “Attention (insert my name). Please go to the (insert company) booth to claim your prize.” I ignored it because I knew I didn’t enter any drawings and thought someone with my same name was the real winner. Then I heard the announcement a second time. I went to the staff member making the announcements to see what was going on. They said the vendor was adamant that it was me that won the prize. Mortified, I stopped by their booth and declined while explaining policy to them. They were apologetic and said that they just wanted to give me the prize as it was the item I was planning to purchase in their store. My boss was more understanding than I thought he would be.

  24. Delta Delta*

    #4 – The step from Anne to Annie isn’t a huge one and seems like it would be easy for folks to do. The trick is that people would need to know that Anne actually prefers Annie. I have a name that has a shortened form. Although my family and friends call me by the shortened form, it feels too familiar for strangers to do that when I first meet them. As someone who gets nicknamed, I’d rather call the person by their name until they tell me I can use a nickname.

    1. Op4/Annie*

      true! i have one of my job’s very rare zoom meetings this afternoon so im probably gonna put my name there as annie and change it in my email signature to boot to show that i prefer annie

      1. Consonance*

        My experience with email-based communication is that people might have their “official” name in their actual signature, but almost always sign their name above the signature with their “normal” or preferred name. So yes, you can definitely change your email signature, but I always determine how I address someone by how they’ve signed their name *above* the signature (the strongest indicator of how they’d like to be addressed), or if there isn’t a name in that spot, then I default to the given name in the email signature.

        Even if your name as you write it at the bottom of the email is the same as the email signature, I think it would strongly reinforce how you’d like to be addressed if you add the individual name. I spend some amount of mental energy figuring out if I should address someone as Dr. Whatever or Betty if there’s just an email signature, because that’s their whole name, not their preferred mode of address.

        Example:

        Dear so and so,

        Yada yada.

        Best,
        Annie

        Annie Smith
        Excellent Title
        Best Organization

  25. hmmm*

    To LW2, I think you can put your nickname and legal name in your email signature, use it as a signoff, and casually mention it to coworkers. Some may forget, but word will get around. My wife has a double first name and goes by a portion of the second one; her signature looks like the one below:

    Sincerely,
    Kat

    Mary Katherine (“Kat”) Gallagher
    Director of Crocodiles
    Animals, Inc.

  26. Delta Delta*

    #1 – Part of me is pretty sure they created this hat knowing exactly what it says. They can play dumb – oops! we didn’t know! But they did. Because corporations are run by white guys who never stop being 13 year olds, so you know there were acres of giggles about the hat. And the fact it’s a Spanish word and that it’s for a Texas team (where, you know, lots of people speak Spanish), this likely seemed like it would be a huge hit and create buzz. The person who ok’d this is not getting fired; they’re getting a promotion. The real tragedy is the terrible design but that’s a different discussion.

    1. dulcinea47*

      the hats were designed centrally by the league (is that the right word?), one for each team, not by the individual teams.

    2. Peanut Hamper*

      I think this is a good time to apply Hanlon’s razor. This wasn’t malice, it was just stupidity, since this is just one of a series of hats all styled the same way. Someone had a great idea, someone else executed it, and now there it is.

      The idea may have been good, but the execution was not. I can imagine that the spec files they looked at on a computer screen had a lot of transparency, but embroidery doesn’t work that way.

          1. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

            Example: the Chicago Cubs has a C for Cubs superimposed over the letter C in the middle of the word CHICAGO. Because the size and font style are different, it looks like some kind of weird printing error.

            The only way I would wear that thing would be if they 1) gave it to me for free AND 2) paid me serious money. I can just about promise that hat is not going to sell well in the windy city or its suburbs!

    3. HonorBox*

      I don’t think that’s the case at all, unfortunately. It isn’t just the Rangers hat. If that was the only one… maybe. But the Anaheim Angels hat is problematic. The Houston Astros hat is problematic. All three have been pulled from production.

      Your last sentence is spot on, too. The hats are just ugly.

  27. Clara*

    For #1, that seems like a failure in the whole product design process. I get that some commenters here might not have known what that meant, but a lot of people do generally know. Did no one feel comfortable speaking up? That’s what I would want to investigate.

    Or they did it on purpose for the joke.

    1. Scarlet ribbons in her hair*

      “Did no one feel comfortable speaking up? ”

      At a former job, an email was sent out to everyone that the company’s owner could think of. It was drafted by Carlos, but all of the employees went over it before it went out. I pointed out that our London branch office’s address was incorrect. Instead of telling Carlos to edit the email, the owner screamed at me to mind my own business. So the email went out with the incorrect address. Some time later, another email was drafted by Carlos, and I noticed that our London branch office’s phone number was incorrect. Because the owner really wanted me to mind my own business, I kept my mouth shut, and the email went out. Then I said, “OMG! The London branch office’s phone number is wrong!” Then the owner screamed at Carlos.

      I didn’t speak up the second time because I didn’t feel comfortable. That’s the way it goes sometimes.

  28. John*

    LW1 reminded me of this: a year ago we received an invitation for a major charity fundraiser.

    The invitation was a tribute multi-fold and there was lots of design work.

    Only problem? They never mentioned the date.

      1. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

        And then there’s the current candidate for mayor of Boston, whose supporters sent out invitations featuring the New York skyline. You probably have to be a Bostonian to appreciate how really bad this was, but if you’ve ever been at a Red Sox-Yankees game, you get the idea.

        1. Sharpie*

          At least those two cities are in the same country. There was the issue of the city of Birmingham printing a whole run of tourist leaflets promoting the attractions of Birmingham. The problem was the leaflet was for Birmingham, UK. The city pictured on the front of the leaflet was Birmingham… Alabama.

        1. LaurCha*

          I see this so often on social media! I’m like, okay, that looks interesting, but where IS this interesting event? Not a clue.

    2. Chirpy*

      I once had to design a ticket for an event that a board member INSISTED could have no more than 7 words on it. It was business card sized and was going out in a mailing, so it needed to have all the information- date, time, location, name of the organization and event…the organization’s name was four words long…

      I don’t remember what I actually did on the final one, but my manager at the time wouldn’t push back to the board. I do remember that I mocked up a normal version with all the info that she shot down, so the final was kind of useless.

  29. Koala*

    Number 1 is a really good data point for WHY DEI is important for business operations. A single Spanish speaker on their team could have saved them a lot of money.

      1. Paint N Drip*

        Honestly I think that’s such a funny design!! Another commenter has mentioned that it’s no longer available and I think that’s a bummer – if absolutely nothing else, sell a bunch of them and donate a portion to breast cancer research or something

    2. HonorBox*

      Yes. Having anyone who speaks Spanish would have helped. Also, as I noted below, a 13 year old me would have definitely laughed out loud at the Astros hat that says, “AsHos.”

    3. doreen*

      Maybe not – having English speakers didn’t prevent “Anaels” and ” Asshos”. The problem is probably less that only Spanish speakers would see the problem with “Tetas” * and more that the people looking at them expected to see “Texas” with a superimposed “T” and that’s all they saw.

      * I saw the problem , and I don’t speak Spanish – but I do know how the mountains allegedly got their name

  30. dulcinea47*

    That thing with the hats was not anywhere close to a mistake that a single person could be fired for. It is a whole series of VERY dumb looking hats where they’ve superimposed the initial over the team name. They all look like nonsense words and it’s shocking that more than one someone gave the go ahead to the idea. It’s just a coincidence that one of them makes a mild naughty word (correct me if you’re a native speaker and I’m wrong, but I get the impression it’s on the level of “boobs”). It’s also a bit much to expect that someone would parse every made-up hat word to make sure it wasn’t slang in any other language.

    1. Productivity Pigeon*

      Not quite related but I recently expressed my frustration to a friend regarding randstad’s web design.

      Someone, MULTIPLE someones, decided that in order to match randstad’s logo, pretty much every single thing on this multimillion-dollar company’s website is written without capital letters.

      I went to their website to look at a job ad and I was just instantly unreasonably irritated by it.

      It’s not a cool touch, I don’t care that your logo doesn’t use capital letters… It looks so unprofessional to me. It doesn’t look modern. It does look unique. Uniquely stupid.

      /end rant ;)

      1. EventPlannerGal*

        If you’d like to be even more irritated check out the journey of Aberdeen Standard Life, which rebranded as ‘abrdn’ to universal mockery and has now given up on that and rebranded again to ‘aberdeen group’ (all lower case). Stupid!

        (Although it did give us all the gift of the following headline on a story about their execs describing the mockery as ‘corporate bullying’: “Abrdn: an apology – sry we kp tkng th pss ot of yr mssng vwls”.)

  31. Juicebox Hero*

    I don’t want to root for the PhiPies! Those pies are stuffed full of cheesesteak and bad attitude!

  32. Ann O'Nemity*

    #1 Um, this is on-brand for Fanatics. After the see-through uniforms and the Oakland A’s hat design that read “Ass,” nothing from them surprises me anymore.

      1. Ann O'Nemity*

        Ah, my mistake! I saw they were pulled from the Fanatics website and mistakenly thought they were a Fanatics product.

  33. HonorBox*

    1 – I’ll admit that I do not have any specific knowledge of the corporate setup at NewEra, the maker of those hats. But, the point of numerous people signing off on the hats is spot on. This wasn’t one person forgetting an “l” when they send out a public notice and one other person not catching it in proofreading. This had to have gone through multiple levels, even just in the design process. The Texas Rangers hat is the most obvious and egregious example of this being an awful design, but there are several others that are close enough to bad words that they’re now selling on eBay for up to a thousand dollars.

    I’ve long said that sometimes the best team member you could have is a teenager because without a doubt 13 year old HonorBox would have identified the errors, just by saying what is printed on the hat out loud first… and then giggling.

  34. Nil*

    #3 when I was in grad school, we had an annual departmental conference, and everyone would get 2 raffle tickets inside their nametags. When they were announcing the winning tickets, the professors wouldn’t even look at their numbers. All the prizes always went to grad students. Until one year when the new assistant professor and his wife (researcher in his lab) won two big prizes. They never got the hint and won other prizes in the next couple of years. He was a POS (very long story), and finally the department told him they wouldn’t give him tenure. He restarted as an assistant professor at a new university.

    Anyways, I totally agree that executives and higher ups shouldn’t enter these raffles.

    1. I should really pick a name*

      I’d say it’s on the organizers for not telling him after he won the first time.

      2. Nil*

        The conferences were run by grad students (a new lab hosted each year). There were no rules that professors shouldn’t participate in the raffles. It was just that they wanted the gifts to go to the students. I understand him not realizing this on the first year, but it was very obvious that professors weren’t checking their tickets during the raffles. He just ignored this “tradition” for years.

        1. I should really pick a name*

          If someone is unaware of a tradition, even if you think they should be, expecting them to spontaneously start following it without being told is unrealistic.

  35. ashie*

    A local nonprofit holds a fundraiser every year where they sell raffle tickets for a car. Anyone can buy a ticket… well one year the President’s mom won the car. She purchased her ticket just like everybody else and the selection process was completely randomized and broadcast live. That seems different from the situation in #3, right?

    1. juliebulie*

      Assuming by “the President’s mom” you mean the president of the nonprofit, no, I don’t think that’s different at all. I don’t care if they bought a ticket. Company officers and their families should not be allowed to play. Or if they play, they should not keep the prize. What is the point of a nonprofit giving away a prize if the nonprofit’s president’s family receives the prize???

      1. doreen*

        I think to a very great extent that depends on the non-profit. When you say “Company officers and their families should not be allowed to play.” , I feel like you are picturing a fairly large non-profit – and not the Little League/PTA president whose kid has to sell raffle tickets just like all the other kids. Except unlike the other kids, the relatives they sell them to can’t win.

        1. Coverage Associate*

          I like this point.

          I guess a parent is a first degree relative, and so organizations that have to have formal policies on similar issues generally do include the mom in this example in their ethics policies, but I can see how the mom could feel cheated if she couldn’t win the prize. What if this was a big organization and the mom and president were estranged?

          We’ve had some letters about the policies that I am thinking of, like someone whose employer wanted him to restrict his family members’ investments, and it comes up occasionally with judges’ recusal where the judge doesn’t own stock in the party, but maybe her brother does.

          Anyway, a large organization would have a formal policy so even if the mom and president were estranged, the mom would be on notice from the fine print that she couldn’t win. Come to think of it, I have actually seen that in the fine print when big businesses have contests (Safeway and McDonald’s Monopoly come to mind).

    2. JB*

      If it’s a fundraiser, then yes, it is different.

      Although I do believe the executives at our company are in the habit of buying lots of tickets at our charity fundraisers and then just pocketing them (instead of dropping them in for prizes) as I know they do buy tickets but can’t recall any of them ever winning a prize. But I wouldn’t be especially sour about it if they did – in that case, the prize is an incentive to donate.

      It would be very different to me if one of them won a door prize at the annual employee appreciation party.

      1. Coverage Associate*

        I have seen executives do similar at other organizations, in terms of buying raffle tickets but not putting them in the drum.

  36. Applesauced*

    My Spanish speaking mother-in-law (who is DELIGHT, no “just-no-mil” drama here) has moved in to help with our baby and I’ve pick up a few Spanish words…. including the phrase “Mira tete” when it’s time to eat

    (“look! bottle (or nipple)”)

  37. Put the Blame on Edamame*

    When I started reading LW1 I figured it would be someone doing a Big Racism/Sexism/Other ‘ism, or like publicly socking someone in the jaw on live TV, not a tiddy hat, so thank you for the sweet relief!

  38. Dinwar*

    My one issue with nicknames at work is that email systems, training records, and the like don’t go by nicknames, they go by real names.

    I had a situation just last week where I had to email someone in another organization. My boss told me something along the lines of “To prep for the meeting tomorrow can you send Bob at Llama Grooming Inc the medical records?” I spent a bit of time looking, and finally had to go to my boss saying “Okay, who’s Bob? I don’t see anything from Bob at Llama Grooming.” His response was “Oh, his name is Phil, everyone just calls him Bob.”

    I also learned a previous boss’s first name that way. I had to get their training records for some reason, and was only able to find it because our system allowed us to input middle names. I’d worked with this person for over ten years and had literally never once heard their first name. it wasn’t in their email, or their nameplate (back when we had cubicles), or anything. I’d run into that issue before, so I was aware of the possibility, but it made things somewhat frustrating (and my boss got a good laugh about it, because it’s not uncommon for them).

    “Anne” vs “Annie” isn’t likely to cause issues with this. But it’s something to be aware of.

    1. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

      Who would have thought there’d ever be nostalgia for cubicles? And yet, they seem positively cozy compared to many current hot-desking setups.

    2. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      Yep. My first real programming job, everyone did this, and corporate had set up email addresses based on legal first names. Often it was a middle name the person used, but just as often it was a complete non sequitur–and, I’m guessing without irony, most of the staff pretty much ignored email.

      Trying to decode all the aliases, while trying to learn the culture and the programming platform, was a nightmare. I don’t have a solution.

    3. Lily Rowan*

      I’ve said this here before, but we have one system (not all of our systems, just the one!) that apparently only has people’s legal names and not any aliases, so it’s a real journey to learn which women legally changed their name when they got married, but kept using their birth name professionally, or vice versa, or which people go by surprising nicknames for their first name.

  39. Hush42*

    #3- I had an employee start several years ago who legal name is, lets say Victoria. I knew that she went by Tori in her personal life (she was recommended by a co-worker). When we were onboarding her I asked her if she wanted her stuff to say Victoria or Tori (i.e. e-mail, log ins, etc). She chose Victoria. When she started I asked if she wanted to go by Victoria or Tori and she said she didn’t really care. We mostly called her Tori since that’s what her friend, who also works at the company calls her and everyone just kinda followed suit. She come to me about 6 months in and told me that she actually would prefer is all her stuff said Tori. We worked with IT to get everything switched over to Tori and that was the end of it. It wasn’t a big deal and I understood that she was in exactly the same position OP was- she felt it was more professional to use her legal name and when she got more comfortable with me and our company culture realized she would prefer her nickname.

    1. Sandra/Sandy*

      Is her email Vlastname@ or Tlastname@ ? We’ve done it both ways at my company and I’m always curious why and if one is more confusing than the other

      1. Hush42*

        It started as Vlastname@ and then when she requested the change they changed it to Tlastname@. I am fairly certain that they just made Tlastname@ an alias so if someone emailed Vlastname@ it would still work but she can tell people Tlastname.

    2. CubeFarmer*

      I think the challenge with Tori is that it’s not (to me) the obvious nickname for Victoria.

      I have a new colleague with a name that naturally shortens. She doesn’t like the shortened version, but I’ve noticed in the few months I’ve worked with her that people naturally default to the shortened version. I wonder if Tori started noticing that people where automatically using “Vicky.”

      1. Hush42*

        That wasn’t the case with Tori but I have another team member who is in a similar situation. She has a name that is very frequently shorted. Think Jessica shortened to Jess. She hates the shortened version of her name. No one directly on our team uses the shortened version but people outside our team do it fairly often. That’s an issue that’s been much harder to fix. I correct people whenever I am part of the conversation but she doesn’t feel comfortable (understandably) correcting our COO or director level people when they use the shortened version.

  40. Joana*

    For #3, I gotta agree with Alison. I had my own experience of this. I work fast food and we have a scheduling app that also doubles as a place where we can enter giveaways the franchise is doing for its employees. Things like gift cards, cash prizes, sometimes there’s a trip to a museum or something. A couple years ago one of the prizes was a paid day off for Christmas. I’m pretty sure everyone entered for that one.

    A manager won it. I’m pretty sure everyone agreed that the managers shouldn’t have been able to even enter. Even if they’re broke and need the extra pay, the cashiers being paid minimum wage needed it more and letting someone who probably made if not twice, then several dollars more than them get it was unfair.

  41. Manders*

    I have been snort-giggling for several minutes imagining telling my boss “I probably should have brought this up at the beginning of my tenure here, but I really prefer to go by my nickname of Keg Master. Anne has always felt too formal.”

  42. CommanderBanana*

    I don’t speak Spanish and even I know “tetas.”

    That being said? Those hats are probably going to be on resale on eBay or elsewhere for $$$ because that design blunder is hilarious.

    1. Kristin*

      Yes, I don’t even watch sports and I want one! ;)
      That’s the kind of mistake only a committee would make. And the day an entire committee is fired is the day corporations are no longer legally “persons.”

    2. HonorBox*

      They’re selling for as much as $1000.

      If only I’d have gotten a few before they were taken down off the NewEra site…

  43. naptato*

    re: #3:
    A senior director that I had briefly instituted a monthly draw where everyone could give “kudos” to their coworkers and the person with the most at the end of the month would get an Amazon gift card. The first month went to a person she very much did not like, so the next month she reminded people that they could give kudos to anyone up to VP! Then she won for two months in a row and I made a stink about it to HR and it disappeared.

  44. Alianne*

    For #1, I am reminded of a marketing firm in my city that tried to drum up goodwill by randomly sending boxes of giant cookies to the businesses they wanted to connect with. Except they sent the cookies on Ash Wednesday, which also coincided with the start of Ramadan. The social/outreach people at that firm should not be *fired*, but they should have taken a look at the calendar and considered that this might not be the best time of year to be offering food willy-nilly.

    1. Coverage Associate*

      I worked one place for the type of Catholics who had the office Easter party on Good Friday. As a different type of Catholic, I brought bread of affliction to that potluck, except I wrote it in a different language.

      My friend’s government office once delayed their Mardi Gras party by a day to Ash Wednesday. She brought bottled water.

  45. Amber Rose*

    I don’t think anyone pays attention to anyone’s name.

    Sincerely, Amber who is Amber in her emails and signature and is only ever, ever called Amanda in every possible communication.

  46. Dogbythefire*

    At a large dinner meeting, put on by our org, I watched as a senior exec won a good raffle prize – a good one. The faces of the people invited to the “gala” as he rose to accept the prize made it so clear how wrong this was.

  47. Phony Genius*

    On #3, I wonder how many prizes there were in total, and whether the senior managers were winning at a higher rate than random chance. We have seen letters here where such drawings have been rigged for higher-ups or their relatives.

    1. linger*

      If a raffle is based on tickets purchased, it doesn’t even have to be rigged, because senior management can afford to buy more tickets.

      (By contrast, as far as I could tell, our general staff parties had truly random prize drawings, with one ballot per person who had pre-registered as attending.)

  48. Sunflower*

    #1 I remember when my workplace sent out a boatload of flyers with the wrong phone number. Our phone number starts with 888. The flyer shows 800. You do not want to dial 800. The guy who made up the flyer didn’t get fired but there were a lot of people in line who should have verified the final product before going to print.

    1. CubeFarmer*

      That’s happened where I work. The person who SHOULD have looked didn’t, and then everyone glanced and assumed it was okay. Yup, phone number was wrong. (The person who should have looked turned out to be a problematic employee so we all were on watch with those work products afterwards.)

  50. CubeFarmer*

    RE: the Texas one, if that’s not an argument for DEI policies in organizations, then I don’t know what is. A Spanish-speaker would have flagged that as problematic immediately.

    1. Bruce*

      Reminds me of GM wondering why the Chevy Nova did not sell well in Spanish speaking countries :-)

    2. fhqwhgads*

      There are plenty of Spanish speakers in baseball. The whole line is a design nightmare. Somebody said “put the single character logo over the full team logo” for allllll the hats for all the teams. Most of them look absurd, even if they don’t spell out something specific.
      I am pro DEI, but it would not have made a difference here. Just ask the Houston AsHos.

  51. NotmyUsualName*

    My husbands company does a raffle at the Xmas party and they have 1 draw for anyone mid level management and up for a moderate prize – usually ~$50-100 gift card. And then the rest of the prizes they are excluded from.

  52. ChurchOfDietCoke*

    When I was in university I had a part-time job working on the stage door of a theatre, and one of the jobs I did was to take in and sign for deliveries. One afternoon I saw a large van pull up and the guy offloaded dozens and dozens of HUGE boxes of promotional material – posters, booklets, leaflets etc. for the forthcoming season. All glossy, printed in colour, super-expensive stuff.

    At around that time the theatre was changing its name from City Apollo to Theatre for City and all of printed material needed to reflect that it was Theatre for City (formerly known as City Apollo).

    Except no-one in the design, marketing, admin or management teams had noticed that they’d spelled it as ‘formally’ not ‘formerly’. Apparently the first person to notice the error was me, when I was counting the boxes and checking their contents against the delivery note.

    I’m in the UK, where firing people is pretty damn hard, but the Marketing Manager was marched out of the theatre that afternoon and never came back. Apparently reprinting the whole lot in a rush cost THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS. Oops…

  53. Tradd*

    Years ago (transportation industry), a company I worked for raffled off donated tickets from an airline for anywhere in the US, including Alaska/Hawaii. The daughter of the branch manager who had just been hired won the tickets. It looked really bad. There was much grumbling among the employees.

  55. DE*

    Why are we being less forgiving with mistakes of conduct than we are with mistakes of performance? I wish that distinction had been clarified in the answer to number 1.

    1. Strive to Excel*

      I believe Alison meant “single mistakes at work” vs “single example of bad conduct/behavior at work” rather than “mistakes in performance vs mistakes in conduct”. There’s a big difference between making a workplace error and deliberately calling someone a slur.

    3. metadata minion*

      “Mistakes” of conduct are usually more intentional than mistakes of performance. Everyone can have an off day at work, transpose a number, etc., and as Alison notes, sometimes the fix to that kind of situation is that more people need to be looking over the draft because anyone can slip up. But if you yell racist things or hit someone…unless there was some dramatically extenuating circumstances (on the level of “had an unusual reaction to a new medication and were literally psychotic”), now I know that you’re the sort of person who yells racist stuff. And even if you’re restraining yourself from yelling, you’re presumably still racist and treating our staff/clients/etc. of color accordingly.

      1. Kyrielle*

        Yeah, “this process needs to involve more people proofing” can avoid future mistakes, and anyone can make a mistake, but there really isn’t a process that can fix punching your coworker or calling them a slur.

      2. Coverage Associate*

        What’s been said. My example: A local coffee shop owner is being sued for kicking out (with force and on camera) a paying customer because of the customer’s religious clothing. That is someone who just shouldn’t be in the coffee shop business, or at least not customer facing.

        If he had misspelled his own business’s name on a sign or had a logo that made teenage boys snicker, I would say he should fix it, but he didn’t need to sell the business.

  56. B. Millicent Roberts*

    Number 1 is just hilarious but it does remind me of when Mattel put out all those Wicked themed Barbies and the unchecked url led to a porn site. That’s something with a little more at stake lol

  57. Bruce*

    LW3 reminds me of the company picnic where the CEO’s assistant drew the names for the grand prize from a bowl and drew her own name! Fortunately it was a small enough company that she was well known and respected, there was a bit of teasing but I did not hear any serious gripes in my circles… if I had been closer to the hourly workers I may have heard more! This was way back in the 80s and if I recall correctly it was a couple of years after a big layoff, so there was definitely some history that could have been dredged up. But no one seemed to blame her.

  58. Forrest Rhodes*

    About the hats: Former New Mexico resident here, and my flabber is gasted that nobody picked up on “TeTas.” In daily life, all over the Southwest, Spanish and English and Spanglish are all in regular use, and I feel comfortable guaranteeing that “tetas” is understood in all three.

    Maybe what other commenters have suggested is correct: it was a “tee, hee, hee,” 13-year-old boy mentality at the hat-producing company—”Let’s see how long it takes them to figure *this* out!”

  59. Strive to Excel*

    #1 – This sort of error is spectacularly common. Weirdly, this happens a *lot* with car companies. I think every single car company has one major advertising whiff where they should have gotten a class of 6th grade boys from the country they are entering to read their slogans. It’ll just go on the list for future marketing majors to study as what not to do.

  60. One of many Jennifers*

    As a Jennifer born in the late 1980s…sometimes the nicknames are necessary! In my building we have 5 Jennifers, and if they didn’t go by some variations of Jen, Jenny, and Jenna, we would never know who was talking to who. I’ve been Jenn since the three Jennifers in my third grade class had to differentiate.

    1. Bruce*

      I worked at a place that had 5 guys named Bruce at the same time, and three of us were in the same branch of engineering… and we had a PA system! Luckily there was not a lot of reason to page any of the Bruces, but we also had a large contingent of production workers from one SE Asian country including 3 team-leads with the same exact first name and last name, and there were constant pages of “name-1”, “name-2”, “name-3 call the test supervisor”

    2. Kyrielle*

      I went to a college where we had enough Jennifers that one of them gave up and asked everyone to call her ‘Fred’ – and we did.

  61. It's an intern*

    My business works with the Texas Rangers Baseball team and has for decades.
    From experience, they have probably put an intern over marketing. They seem to have interns over all their other essential departments. It’s rough.

  62. tina turner*

    #1 – Researching what a hat name could “mean” in other languages seems to me to be a big part of the job. Not doing that, or ignoring it, could be fire-worthy to me. It projects not caring about other cultures, and not being thorough.

    1. Coverage Associate*

      The question would be whose job. If the league wanted to fire the marketing company, that might be reasonable, but if the marketing company wants to fire the graphic designer, it probably wouldn’t be, because that’s not usually part of a graphic design job. It should be someone with cultural expertise, or better a team with combined expertise, rather than the first person with the idea or design.

      I can imagine a business with a graphic designer who has some sort of cultural sensitivity process to go through, but it wouldn’t be typical. For example, another check that needs to happen would be copyright and trademark. A graphic designer could be trained to check those databases if a business had a small legal team or something, but it wouldn’t normally be the designer’s job.

  63. Stone Bear, resident curmudgeon*

    Re: #1: Speaking as somebody who *did* Sev-1 a company and lived to tell the tale: Yes. If you’re being an idiot (or worse) _consistently_ that’s one thing… but one fat-finger does not a George Jetson warrant. (I know, I’m dating myself…) I had a large part in cleaning up the mess, and the CTO, wise man that he was, asked some pointed questions and said, “Why the heck are we running this brittle, unstable piece of crap our entire infrastructure depends on anyway?” and got us onto a proper system that we can easily un-break if we do manage to break it (and it’s actually very good about not letting us break things). Four years on, we evolved it a bit but overall, very few complaints and those have mostly been fixed… and I’m very glad I got to stay b/c the team we evolved into is pretty darn awesome.

  65. Name Change*

    #4 – I recently changed my name at work from my full name to an uncommon diminutive of that name after 2.5 years at the company and everyone seems fine with it. At first, I only changed my email signoff but then I discovered our HR system lets us easily change our display name from our legal name to a preferred name, so I made that change. I’m assuming my manager was given a script after the update (although if she wasn’t, kudos to her!) because she reached out asking what I wanted to be called and then made a little matter-of-fact announcement at our next team meeting. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how most people call me by my nickname 90% of the time despite calling me something else for so long. If you want to be called something else at work, go for it! It feels so validating to be called by the name you prefer.

  66. Catsup*

    Re: the hat mistake

    Like Alison said, usually these types of mistakes are due to multiple people – not one person – dropping the ball. But unfortunately, a lot of companies like to scapegoat one person to make an example out of them. I think this is terrible but it’s very common.

  67. Eliane (for today)*

    Re #4: When I had my first professional summer internship, I applied with my full name on my application/resume (think Elaine) even though everyone always calls me Ellie. When I got there, I introduced myself as Ellie, and my boss said, “Oh no, we know you as Elaine”. The other interns called me Ellie, and eventually my boss did too. At the end of the summer, my boss told me, “You know, when we started I thought you were dumb because you never responded when I called your name. But then I realized the other interns called you Ellie, so I did and you started responding.”

    I changed my resume after that.

  68. Mistakes, I've made them*

    Where I work nearly all our mistakes are pretty public, and so at varying degrees of ‘big/bad’. Our rules that we tell folks as we onboard them are basically, ‘you are going to make a mistake because you are human – we expect that and will not be mad ever. What will make us upset is if you try to hide that mistake. All that really matters is that you tell someone and how you go about rectifying the error.’ Then we give them the names of a few folks to go to whenever they make a mistake or to ask questions to if they need help to prevent one. We also pretty often will have story time where we all talk about the mistakes we’ve made over the years.

    All that to say, mistakes shouldn’t lead to firing outside of extenuating circumstances – all that does (IMO) is lead to people trying to cover things up making it all worse in the long run.

  69. Emily Byrd Starr*

    LW 1: Stephen Colbert did a hilarious segment about the hats the other night. Yes, he included the Texas one.

  71. Database Developer Dude*

    My work email is lastname_firstname@mycompany.com, but since my company uses Microsoft products to handle email, they were able to change the description field in my Active Directory account to read Lastname, First Initial, Middle Initial (because I go by my initials), and my signature block has initials. Easy peasy if you’re nice to the IT infrastructure folks.

  72. OMG, Bees!*

    LW1 reminds me of a Reddit post on tech support. The poster, as a young engineer, fried his computer early on and was crying while told his boss about it, as he was sure to be fired. His boss took the time to ask what he had learned (don’t connect X and Y) and then assured him the job was safe. After all, the company had just spent so much money on-boarding him, much more than cost of a single computer, and now he had learned a new lesson. It would cost more to hire someone else to have to learn that lesson also.

  73. Fedemp*

    “And yes, it’s totally fine to go by nicknames at work. Not, like, Keg Master or Big Balls, but a normal name that’s just a diminutive? ”

    Not allowed in the federal government anymore. As part of the anti-trans stuff, they are making it so you can only put your full legal name in your signature block. While it is intended to target trans people, impacts a lot of other people as well who go by shortened forms of their name or nicknames .

  74. CaliforniaRoller*

    One of my former employers used to do a two-bucket system for drawings.. One bucket was all the expensive stuff, the other was alcohol. Executives had their names added to the booze drawing only.

    Well, up until the year the sales guy handling tickets swapped the buckets accidentally. You could have heard a pin drop when a vice-president was announced the winner of a brand new $4,000 PC.

    To her credit, she promptly stood up, announced that she already had a very nice computer, thank you, and asked if they minded drawing again.

    Second draw was the CEO.

    They got the buckets straightened out after that, the PC went to an intern, and Dave from Sales was never allowed anywhere near the drawing again.

  75. DJ*

    LW#4 so many employees go by shortened versions of or their nicknames. When I was working in training I’d get a whole list of names to put on the LMS but it was generally easy enough to match a Sam with a Samuel on the system as obviously everyone had to be registered on HR systems by their legal name. Some had their shortened names in their emails.
    Anyhow incredibly common.

  76. Kimberly*

    LW1 Situation – seriously how did someone not catch this? I am horribly mono-lingual in Texas and I knew there was something wrong when I saw the first picture. Had to google the word but I knew there was something off.

    My Dad was a beer distributor in Texas. One year he went to the national meeting and the head of advertising had all of the Texas people in for a big surprise. An ad campaign directed at Texas. It had a rising young comedian from the North traveling through Texas to various historical and culturally significant sites, misstating Texas history – having a beer with the locals who were laughing at him.

    The Texas distributors then spent the rest of the night explaining to the advertising people they had to trash this campaign that was already filmed at a huge cost. Dad said it was so bad they would have been tarred. feathered, and driving out on rails. The worst was the ad filmed in the “Alamo”. On top of the insults, they had people wearing hats in the Alamo (set they would never have been allowed to film inside the real one). The Alamo is considered sacred land/building. You DO NOT wear casual/non-religious hats in the Alamo. As a 7 yo girl I knew to take the baseball cap I was wearing off before stepping on the site.

    Of course things are a bit different now. We now have members of the legislature who referred to Juan Seguin, a hero of the Alamo, the only defender to survive because when Bowie and Travis ordered him to get word to General Houston he was able to get out and get to the General- as “The enemy” when reviewing state Soc Studies Curriculum a while back. There is a reason we only allow the idiots in Austin for 140 days every 2 years and wish our constitution put it at 2 days every 140 years.

  77. Stik Tech Drone*

    Re: L1 Ask the people on the committee to name what is the “South Lake Union Transit” streetcar. That had human eyes all the way up the chain, and it still got past everyone. Probably why no one was fired.

    My husband and I suspect people secretly knew, but found it too funny and wanted to see how far it would get before it was noticed.

  78. Raida*

    3. Executives winning company raffles

    The way I’ve seen this handled previously are:
    1) Using a computer to randomise the names pulled, switching to an x-level and higher excluded list for expensive prizes
    2) Hiding the fact that when a director level or higher is drawn they just pull another name, for expensive prizes
    3) Clearly stating up front that director level and higher have *all donated towards prizes* and therefore have opted out of the draw

    All three have their own benefits –
    1 is handy in making it smooth
    2 is low tech and maintains the physical ‘draw’ and scrounging in a hat for a name
    3 can mean “All of you give $1 (or more) to Jo towards prizes, nobody will win a prize and piss off everyone else, you all get *guaranteed* compliments and thanks in exchange – that’s a 100% chance for good press vs a .5% chance of getting a bottle of wine. Nobody is to whinge about this to their staff.”

Comments are closed.