Aaron Problems

(To the high percentage of my readers who are my parents, sorry for this one.)

1. Erin.

2. Eric.

3. A-A-Ron.

4. Arun. This one wasn’t a problem until I spent a few months living in India, and gradually realized people on the phone were assuming I was Indian.

5. The biblical Aaron is not a great role model. This may be the point of him—he’s not there to model correct behavior, but to help teach that we should obey our high priests no matter what, even if this demonstrably tends to get us killed. We also see this in stories like Jacob and Esau, where all of Jacob’s dirty deeds are justified because he’s just supposed to be in power, as evidenced by the fact that he ends up in power. Rumi’s story of The Prince and the Handmaid is a more explicit example I came across recently. The prince and his pious doctor do all kinds of seemingly terrible things, with Rumi explaining to us the whole time that they must have been the right thing to do because of who was doing them.

6. Aaron Burr, the guy who shot the first secretary of the treasury, also just gets worse the more you read about him. Burr seems to have made it his life’s work to betray Hamilton as often as possible. His dirtiest deed, at least from a literal standpoint, was to get Hamilton to sign off on a license and allocation of funds meant to provide clean drinking water to New York City. Thanks to some fine print, he was able to instead use the funds to start a bank. There was a cholera epidemic from unclean water the following year, but Chase Bank was a powerful political asset for Burr. Even after killing him, Burr kept betraying Hamilton. He tried to conspire with the British to help them reconquer the U.S. and install him as governor.

7. A bird native to my area has a call that sounds exactly like a child screaming my name. There’s usually a few living in my yard during the warmer months (they just moved back in). You’d think I’d get used to it but I don’t.

8. I mostly like being first in alphabetical order, out of narcissism, but it does cause problems. People picking names out of a corporate directory at random will sometimes pick me first (Slack, for example, sorts by first name). If you’re picking names at random, you are probably not in the happiest place with the company. Also, alphabetical order once almost got me deported? I had just moved to a corporate campus in India for training, as part of a class of new hires (“freshers”), all foreigners. We each needed to present ourselves at the local police station in order to get our visas. They split us into groups so that we could stagger the trips over a few days to save on busses. Each morning, someone would use the classroom projector to display the list of that day’s applicants. The first day, they misaligned the list so that the first name, mine, wasn’t visible. I just assumed I was in a later group. In my memory, which has almost certainly revised itself for dramatic irony purposes, I was sitting in a corporate ethics class being told that under no circumstances were we to bribe a government official, when someone burst into the room to tell me I had an urgent mission. After a harrowing ride on busy streets in a doorless auto-rickshaw, I presented myself, only a day or so past the legal deadline, to a police officer at the station. My coworker went off alone with him into a room, then came back and said, “okay, you’re good.” No idea what could possibly have happened in that room.

9. At a later job, I realized about two days after being hired that the job should’ve gone to an existing employee, also named Aaron, who’d been unfairly denied a promotion. Instead, they’d hired me to be his manager. It was awkward. I always referred to him as “the real Aaron.”

10. It’s surprising how many people get overly enthusiastic and misspell it “Aaaron.” That one’s not actually a problem. I love it. Finally I’m ahead of aardvarks.

Pictured: Screenshot from the First Bank of Poopwater’s current website. I’m sure they’re “acting with integrity and responsibility” just as much as they did when they were founded.