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.