"I see you've spent some time at X, who was your line manager there?"

[CoolCat]

Like it. I may suggest Wayne Kerr for the next one.

Juan King

[GJABS]

Unfortunately, you have missed a trick. I like to use a foreign sounding made-up name that sounds, phonentically, like something a bit naughty!

Like these guys did!

Ah, the prank airport announcements.

These date back to the Chris Morris Radio Show in 1994, and were in the early days of the internet circulated around as sound files in a Microsoft Word document.

[chopper]

Droid "So I place a lot of people at $currentclient, could I ask who your line manager is? I might know him already..."
Me "Do you know Yuri"
Droid "Yeah I've heard of a couple of Yuris at $currentclient... Which one?"
Me "oh, Nator".
Droid "Yuri Nator?"
Me "Yep."
Droid "Yes, I know him. Small world."

One hopes his next call was to the switchboard, touting for business, asking for Yuri Nator.

[kaiser78]

"Line Manager", as a contractor ??

[chopper]

"Line Manager", as a contractor ??

Actually... I was a permie at the time.

I had been bitten by the previous droid who managed to get the actual name of my line manager, who he did actually know, and he did actually call him and tell him that I was sniffing around for a contracting role so maybe he'd like to look at more staff. Haven't fallen for that trick.

Fortunately, $employer had announced a(nother) re-org a couple of days prior, so said line manager understood exactly what was going on so it actually wasn't awkward at all.

[RetSet]

"Line Manager", as a contractor ??

Exactly.

NLUK will be proud of you