WAM Origins

It was brought to my attention on Facebook that I have never actually told the story of how WAM earned her alias. I've used that name for her on my blog since 2006 and, while I have said what it stands for, I've never said how she got it.

I've said it many times; there's something not right with WAM. It's in her brain, something that makes her perceive the world in her own way, a way that is vastly different and totally unlike the way the rest of us perceive the world. Coworkers have speculated that it must be some form of Autism, high-functioning to be sure but debilitating enough that the rest of us just aren't prepared to deal with her. Anything can set her off, especially if you don't agree with her or don't let her have the last word.

Some of the stories she tells are so fantastical that they cannot possibly be true. She used to date several professional wrestlers who regularly hold matches over her, she's personal friends with many politicians and celebrities - who she calls regularly for advice, opinions, or to demand they do something, and everyone in her family is either a doctor or a lawyer or both and this fact makes her an expert on whatever subject you could possibly bring up.

She walks with a fast, heavy gait. She will mow you over in a heartbeat if you cross her path. This is quite laughable as she's a tiny little mouse of a woman with huge, not-quite Coke bottle glasses who is in her 40's and lives in an apartment with her mother - whom she calls several times throughout the day. She gets very excited when she has a new (fabricated) story to tell, and nothing will deter her until she has told it all, short of yelling at her. (Ask me about the time she was 'engaged' sometime.) Yelling at her, by the way, will either earn you a complaint with HR or the bosses, or some days of silent treatment. Lately, silent treatment has been the more likely reward.

WAM and I work in the same group and have the same supervisor. Before he was a supervisor, he was just a coworker in our group as well. When we first moved to this building, a more rigid cube farm than our previous location, Adolf (that's the supervisor, if you're new to my blog aliases) sat in a cube at the front of an aisle, right near the busiest walkway on the floor and open to a lot of traffic. When WAM had one of her stories, rather than coming around to stand in his cubicle behind him, she would just pop her head over the cube wall. Adolf said it was exactly like those Whack-A-Mole games at carnivals, where you have a big mallet and you whack the moles when they pop up out of the holes. He, on more than one occasion, expressed a desire for such a mallet, because she would pop up so suddenly and energetically that, thus startled, the urge to whack her one was hard to contain. I have never sat in one of those cubes where her popping up, mole-like, was possible.

So, she was then aptly nicknamed WAM (for Whack A Mole), by the not-yet supervisor and adopted by the rest of us, justly earned.