A little bit pregnant

Several years ago I was working at a company called Sarcom.  It was an IS department with an application development team of three and a pool of contractors/consultants.  All the consultants were grouped in a small room with ten cubes.

Our client site manager was named Nancy Snider.  She was a terrific manager and just a fun person to talk with because she had a great sense of humor.

Nancy was very tiny person.  She weighed maybe ninety pounds soaking wet before she was pregnant and, so when she was seven or eight months pregnant, she looked huge as a result even though she had gained maybe ten pounds.

One day she was in our small room chatting with Doug Smith.  Doug was a person who's laughter and voice would fill a room.  I was in the next cube programming away as he and Nancy were casually talking for several minutes.  Doug steered the conversation to the child Nancy was carrying.

"Have you come up with any names yet?" he asked her.

"Well, if it's a boy, we are going to call him ..." I don't remember what the boy's name was, but she did go into detail why they were going to name whatever that name was.  She had a girl anyhow.

"... and if it's a girl, we are going with Aubrey," she told him.

Doug asked her, "Have you considered the name Bryon Jordan Snider?"  A couple people in the room chuckled; perhaps Stacey and George.  I think Holly and a couple others were in there around that time as well.

Upon hearing it, I stopped typing and pushed myself backwards out of the cube to their conversation.  The cubes were so small, I could not back away from the desk and get up unless I pushed all the way out.

I didn't even look at Nancy and said in a total dead panned voice to Doug, "What?  Name it after the father?"

In pretty much any company this would likely be sexual harassment and I am simply glad Nancy took it in the humorous vein it was meant to be as the entire room including Nancy burst out laughing.  And it was a long laugh and a loud laugh for everyone in that room.

Nancy was standing there laughing, but she finally got out, "Oh my God you guys are so rude!"  And she continued to laugh after that as well.

At least I think it set the tone though that Nancy knew I was simply a harmless smart aleck going forward, but I never pushed the envelope that far again.