Paul Hammond's Blog

For a while now, I have believed that every office has a Kevin.  No matter where you work, you find that one person who is a magnet for “amusing anecdotes to tell at the pub”.  I call this “having a Kevin” in honour of one of our sales guys when I worked back at Worldmachine.

A couple of my favourite Kevin-isms:

• Kevin wore casual clothes to work most days, with a suit in the office closet for client meetings.  Wednesday, 10am.  Kevin realises he needs his suit dry-cleaned for a client meeting the next day.  Since it is winter and pretty grotty out, Kevin gets a white bin/trash liner bag from the supplies cupboard, covers his suit, and hangs it on the cubicle wall behind him ready to take to the dry cleaners later that day.  Of course he forgets about it and goes home that night.  Unfortunately, Wednesday is “cleaners day”, and by sheer Kevin-luck, he has left the trash bag enclosed suit hanging above the trash can!  On arrival at work the next morning, Kevin realises that the suit he forgot to get dry-cleaned is no longer hanging there waiting for him to don for the impending client meeting.  Before you know it, Kevin is in the dumpster behind the office, knee deep in rotting vegetables from the restaurant below us, desperately searching for the Worldmachine trash bags containing his suit.  Once located, the suit is immediately put on, and he is off to the client meeting…
• We ate at a nice Italian restaurant a few times for Worldmachine team outings.  Kevin liked the steak.  The waiter took his order – New York Prime, rare – and disappeared.  When he returned with the food, Kevin looked perturbed.  The waiter asked if everything was OK, and Kevin “umm’ed and aah’ed” a bit, then said “yeah, sure…”  The waiter, sensing that perhaps something was wrong, sent over the head waiter.  “Is everything OK sir?”.  “Well, I think you brought me the wrong dish.”  The head waiter asks what he ordered, and he replies with the New York Rump.  The head waiter responded that “we have a New York, and a Rump – that is the Rump”.  Kevin decides that he really wanted the New York (a dish he had enjoyed before), so the head waiter says “no problem”, scoops up the plate and heads off to get the right dish.  A+ for customer service.  Then, as he is walking away, Kevin suddenly calls out “Hey, you couldn’t box that one up for me could you?”.  And they did.  And they didn’t charge him for it!

For a while, in my team at MSN, Mustafa took the role of Kevin for the team.  Some amusing episodes gave him the crown.  He once physically shoved a Senior VP out of the way of the sink with the words “come on, hurry up”, thinking he was someone else.  He mistakenly received a confirmation for an armoured car order.  The FBI scheduled a couple of meetings with him to talk about NT security.  Not quite up to Kevin-esque quality, but pretty funny.

However, Mustafa’s position as “Head Kevin” has been usurped.  Enter the new champion, Paul.  Paul worked with us a while back, and I swear I don’t remember him being this bad.  He has been back at MSN 2 months, and the list of Kevin-isms is already on two sides of paper.  A selection:

• We went to Barcelona for a team offsite last week.  30 minutes before leaving for the airport, he joined us at the breakfast table, grabbed a cup of coffee and then casually delivered the comment “I lost my passport”.  Matt replied with “I sincerely hope you mean you lost it, but found it again?”.  “Oh no, it’s still lost!”.  Not only is the losing of said article typical, the total lack of concern is pretty common too!  He found it not long after tucked behind the mini-bar.
• After a meeting, everyone had left and someone held up a watch saying “who does this watch belong to”.  Without even looking up I said “it is probably Paul’s”.  Bingo!  Forgetting things is pretty common – his bag in a pub the other week, his coat in a Tapas bar in Barcelona.  It is funnier because everyone else generally notices and then waits for Paul to come running back with a sheepish grin on his face.
• Paul’s desk is the clearest desk in the whole office.  This is because it limits the damage when he knocks his bottles of water over.  That has to be a 2 or 3 times a week habit for him.
• Another colleague Jack mentioned the other day that he knows when Paul is coming because of the noise he makes bumping into things.

I am told Paul’s nickname is “cluster”.  It is short for clusterf**k.  The Urban Dictionary includes these definitions: “to have everything wrong happen at the exact same time”, “commonly used to descriptively generalize any situation with a large scale of disarray”.  I think this about sums Paul up!

Every office has a Kevin.  Who is yours?