Life as employee 461224

Several years ago, Addidas had a commercial featuring Boston Celtic Antoine Walker in which he said "I'm employee number eight. I make baskets." It was an interesting marketing campaign, especially considering it ran about five years ago and I not only remember it, but I'm using it in this blog.

It got me thinking about my own job as employee 461224. Honestly, I have absolutly no idea what my employee ID number means or if I'm voilating some company policy by posting in here in this crazy interweb thing.

First of all, why does my company feel the need to label us with numbers. For years, our teachers were able to use last names to keep track of their students. They had 28 in a class and had five classes. Yet I never got the grades for Ryan Morgan or Matt Shumaker. Nope, I always got my own grades. But for some reason, Morris Multimedia assigns us a number to be known as.

Secondly, if the federal government can keep track of the nearly 300 million people in this country with a nine-digit social security number, why does my office need six digits to keep track of no more than 100 of us? There's no reason a three or four digit number wouldn't be enough, but six? Seriously, where am I working that at any given time there could be 1,000,000 possible employees that would all need their own number? If I'm in that large of a company, I want a raise.

While my immediate supervisor knows my name, I keep execting his boss or his boss' boss to refer to me as "461224" and I'd have to tell him that around the office, I go by "461."

I keep waiting for the day the computer screws up and my paycheck is made out to 461224.