Finding the lost tribe

And now, two weeks later… Ah, these lazy dog days of July and August… As I was saying, now I’ve returned from a 3,500 mile road trip to Hungary and back, I was going to write about The People here - the Lost Tribe known as LBi. Having been hidden from each other for so long, hanging in established, safe cliques and karrasses, fearing strangers… Anyway, coming together in to one space was always going to be a bit of a culture shock, particularly in such an open plan building. In Atlantis, there is nowhere to hide. 

Not that one particularly wants to hide, you understand, but working under one roof does mean meeting a lot of people for the first time, or for the first time in person anyway. For months, or even years, we’ve been exchanging mails with each other and calling each other without ever meeting - we’ve been invisible. Or if we did meet, at office parties, or the pub after professional interactions, the connections between names, voices, mails and faces was never explicit, and usually, inevitably, clouded by revelry.

Now we’re all visible, and even if we’re not working together, we’re constantly passing each other as we walk the floors, meeting in kitchens or on the terrace, on various staircases - nodding politely but never quite sure who it is we’re nodding at. This creates a minor but sometimes quite sensitive problem, particularly for those of us for whom the names-faces thing has never been particularly intuitive.

Taking lots of photos of everyone, all the time is one answer to the problem - see above, you can run, kids, but we’ll get you in the end - but it still doesn’t get around the problem of knowing what their names are.

It happened to me twice yesterday. In the first incident, meeting with a guy who looked familiar but I wasn’t getting a name, I went Route One: Deny All Knowledge.
“Hi, I’m Dom,” I said confidently, putting out my hand for a hearty ‘glad to meet you’ shake.
“Yeah,” he said, looking at the hand dubiously, “We’ve met. We spoke at the office party, remember? For about half an hour? I’m James…?” Aha - *that* James. Of course. Which was fairly embarrassing.

As was the second incident, when, chastened by the first incident, I went Route Two: no handshake (because of course we know each other), a friendly, entirely bogus smile of recognition, and a cheery,
“Heeey, how’s it going?” And sure enough, came the response:
“Err, hi, I’m Rich, I’m not sure if we’ve met…?”

On the whole, Route Two seems safer - friendlier somehow… And one thing I’m finding in the new ‘one company, one office’ world of Atlantis, is that LBi is, if nothing else, a very friendly company.