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.
I love this. Our one-floor office was renovating and had a contest to name the rooms. We wound up using local bodies of water, and the sizes of the rooms related to the sizes of the rooms. It was ok, but I don't think most people knew the geography, and for international colleagues there was no point of reference. My idea was to use band or song names with numbers in their names so that the rooms could be sequentially referenced (One would be next to Song 2 next to 3 Doors Down next to The...
You're in a building you don't really know, looking for a room called "Currant", and the only difference in the labels on the doors is the letters A, B, C, D and E.
Which room would you choose, and why?
The obvious answer is to ask someone else nearby for help. But what if they're all in the meeting rooms with the doors closed? You need to try one of the rooms regardless, but it's less awkward if you get the correct room on the first try.
So which do you choose? There's no other information to help you, just the room...
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.