It is common for Microsoft buildings to assign nicknames to meeting rooms to make them easier to remember. Instead of “We will be in room 1728” you can say “We will be in the Magellan room.”
The new Microsoft Building 3 has a series of meeting rooms labeled 1.3A through 1.3E. (The number 1.3 means “first floor, zone 3.”) These meeting rooms also have nicknames, because some people remember nicknames better than arbitrary strings of letters and digits.
Unfortunately, whoever came up with the names chose them to increase confusion rather than reduce it.¹
I was invited to a meeting in a room nicknamed Currant. I naturally went to room C, because Currant starts with C.
Meeting room Currant is not C. It is meeting room D.
In fact, there are two meeting rooms whose nicknames begin with the letter C: Currant and Cascara. Is Cascara room C? No, Cascara is room E.
My recommendation to people who come up with names for meeting rooms: Either align the first letter of the nickname with the room designation or choose a nickname whose first letter does not match any room designation. But if you choose a nickname that begins with a letter that matches a meeting room designation, it had better be the nickname for that room.
In this example, either the nicknames for rooms 1.3A through 1.3E should begin with A through E, respectively, or none of the nicknames should begin with the letters A through E at all.
¹ When I expressed this complaint to a colleague, he said that his wife worked on the architectural design for Building 3. In the plans, the meeting rooms just have the room numbers. The names were presumably concocted by people in the Real Estate and Facilities department.
At one of the startups I worked at we got a bunch of conference rooms in a remodel. The debate about what to name them dragged on, so to make a point I printed a bunch of guids and taped them up on the doors. And yes, I used one guid twice.
I’ve seen in-office fights break out over naming conventions.
The best room name scheme that I’ve experienced was:
* Each building had a theme. Simpsons characters, Hannah-Barbera characters, etc.
* The first letter of the room name indicated the floor: A-M was the first floor, N-Z was the second.
* The length of the name indicated how many seats were in the room. “Bart” was a small room, while “Huckleberry Hound” was a large room.
Why yes these names were created by programmers why do you ask? 😀
Why not have a list of words that you’re allowed to use as room names? Jalapeno, Gnome, Knitting, Tsunami, Pterodactyl, Gneiss, Mnemonic, there’d be no confusion any more.