Name collisions. A few years ago, they hired someone at my company with the same first and last name. And since I had the default email addr, hilarity ensused.
For his interview with the CFO, they scheduled it with me. I happened to be in SF that day and the company was pretty open about things - I actually thought the interview was for me (wow, me and the CFO, cool!) but I couldn’t make it because I was out on a sailboat for a team-building thing. So, I told them that I was going to be out on the bay on a boat and asked them to reschedule... and they did. Sorry!
After he started, I got all of his expenses showing up in my Concur account. Turns out he stayed at the Four Seasons a lot.
Once, I got emailed a Google Sheet with the comp and stock packages for his entire org (he was head of the Commerce org). I looked at it briefly, confused, before figuring out what it was. I let HR know, and they were nice about it.
I had the default email address, so I received tons of wrong emails, both internally and externally—offers to be the CEO of Nike, for example. Someone once joked that I should have replied with a condition: $15k just to talk!
Most people were cool about it, but there was this one woman. After sending me a bunch of documents (which I forwarded to the other Nathan and explained the mix-up), she replied with a threatening email, telling me I’d be in trouble if I looked at any of it. I told her, "Well, then you should be more careful about who you send it to." Then, I forwarded it all to him. Seriously, fuck that.
He and I met once—nice guy. He used to be the CEO of Ticketmaster. Once, he made a bet on a basketball game, and someone sent me the $100 he won. He told me to keep it.
Anthony: Honestly, I’m kind of shocked you didn’t swap addresses—or that they didn’t move you both to entirely new ones.
Nathan: Yeah, I tried to get nathan@.... That would’ve worked for me, but IT wouldn’t do it because it once belonged to some other Tweep.
Oh, I did set up an alias, nathanhubard—and guess what? All I got was still stuff meant for him.
I also used n8@ for a while, but after he left, it finally died down a bit.
August: This is a great story!