"What a Cluster!!!"

ARGH! This is so frustrating. So, I have a really, really common name. It really has become the bane of my existence, I swear. So there was another person at my company who shared my exact, same name. So, from the very beginning, and I'm talking before I was even actually hired, this has been a huge pain in the ASS. In order to submit my application so that I could be hired, I had to open an online account with the company career center. Only the application wouldn't allow me to open the account because it said that I already worked there. Only I didn't, SHE did. ARGH! So I knew from the very beginning that this was going to be a problem. My email address had to be qualified with my middle initial, which meant that I was forever getting her emails, IMs, meeting invites, mail, BlackBerry invoices, phone calls, you name it (and she was forever receiving mine).

This was all enough of a big pain in the ass, but then she left the company in November. Well. Three days after that, my BlackBerry was turned off. After calling tech support the following week and sorting it out, turns out that they thought MY BlackBerry was HERS. So mine got shut off. Got that turned back on. And then over the months I've received emails and demands with spreadsheets asking for information about applications or databases I had never heard of, with my name designated as the application "expert". Each time I've been like, "WTF???" And of course most of these applications sounded just familiar enough that I wasn't 100% sure at first that it wasn't something of mine, which meant each time it was something that I had to spend time investigating a bit. But each and every time it was something for the former employee. Someone searching for info on something and looking for someone with my name (who also used to work for IT) and just assuming I must be the right person.

And now the latest kicker was this past Thursday. Suddenly my BlackBerry stopped loading email. Again. Dead all weekend, I tested the IM service and the phone this morning and everything was gone. W. T. F. So I called tech support again and they told me that I seemed to no longer have a BB account and that I was going to have to call the service provider. Called Sprint/Nextel and ended up on the phone with them for about an hour with the end result that they couldn't help me either. Although, they WERE able to tell me the "new" account name associated with my phone number (someone in Retirement and Investment Services, not even remotely related to my group). So, finally I found an internal "Mobile Support Group", called them and it turns out they WERE the right people to talk to. Even still, they had me on the phone for a half an hour or so while they unsnarled the problem. And of course they also had to go back to Sprint/Nextel to get the account sorted out. So basically, what they figured happened is that the old account got deleted, the other person's BB was even with a different service provider (Verizon), but then someone eye-balling the list of people who should have been cut off, saw my name and deleted it in a panic. Or something. SHEESH!!! As Julia would say, "WHAT A CLUSTER!!!" GAH! What next?