Mistaken identity

Have you ever been mistaken for someone else? I have and each time has been terrifying and hilarious in equal measure. In that order. Terrifying while I scramble through my mind struggling to understand exactly what is going on and then hilarious – and relieving – when it dawns on me that I am not the person, who the person talking to me, thinks I am. On Sunday night I was scrolling through twitter on my phone when I saw that Rupert Guinness, a sports journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, had sent me a message. He asked if I was looking forward to starting new horizons tomorrow, being Monday.

A few minutes earlier I had posted a link to this blog about adjusting to childcare. I thought it seemed a long bow to draw as I really hadn’t pictured Rupert as a reader of this blog, but ‘What else could he possibly mean? I thought to myself. So I replied. I tweeted ‘Fortunately things on my new horizon are getting smoother now’. Which in hindsight, he must have thought was very odd. But not as odd as his next message seemed to me. He wrote ‘No I mean about your desk change tomorrow. I see you’re coming to sit with us’.

At this point I found myself laughing with unease and confusion. See, there were desk changes happening at my work over the weekend. I just didn’t think I was among them. And while it seemed odd that either the sports team was moving to our level, or that I was moving to the sports team, we do work in the same building so there was a tiny thread of possibility. Strange? Very. Unlikely? Certainly. But not completely outside the realm of possibility. So here I was at 10pm on Sunday night wondering where on earth I would be sitting the next day. And why I hadn’t heard anything sooner.

And then order was restored. Rupert thought he’d been tweeting Georgina Robinson, a Herald reporter who was starting with the sports team on Monday (who reasonably enough was moving desks). Once clarified, the three of us found the exchange very funny.

Strangely enough it’s not the worst case of mistaken identity I’ve experienced. Back when I started my first job as a writer, the big editor, who was my boss’s boss, tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to go to his office. This editor rarely ventured outside his office and particularly not to our side of the floor, so his presence in itself caused a stir. Eyes were firmly on me as I walked across the floor into his office.  I assumed I must be getting fired which I thought was a real shame because I had barely been there a few weeks.

But in we went. He started quizzing me on my job. How it was going. What I was working on. If I was enjoying it. And, then, a query from leftfield. ‘How are your hands?’ he asked. Momentarily, I was stumped.  I looked down at them and wondered. I’m not a gifted pianist, I’m hardly handy around the house and I don’t even have nice handwriting. But it was also probably the first time I’d ever given my hands much thought. Surely that means they’re pretty reliable which has to count for something? I muttered something about having no complaints.

He continued on about a new role he thought would be more suitable for me. Bearing in mind I’d only been in my current role thirty seconds I thought this seemed odd. And then I had a flicker of sense. I realised the editor thought I was my colleague who was suffering RSI and needed a new role. I suggested that perhaps he wanted to talk to her. At which point he stared straight at me, with an exquisite look of fear and confusion in his eyes, obviously wondering who the hell I was. We continued awkwardly until I was dismissed. Back at my desk there were many questions and much laughter as I explained the situation. Not long afterwards my own boss approached me. He had it on fairly good authority that his own boss was unlikely to venture across to our side of the floor again. Ever.

Have you ever been mistaken for someone else?