By Anonymous
After a few weeks into my first job at a Big Federal Government Agency after I graduated from university, I was bewildered by many aspects of office-tower life. The most confounding problem, the one that seemed to exist for no reason other than to Make My Life Feel Like Crap, was the powerful rumour mill. I tried to get my work done, keep my head down, make a Good Impression, but was distracted by a slippery, hungry nest of vipers. Specifically, vipers drawing on the blood of gossip that flowed in, around and over the flimsy walls of our cubicles, sparing no one.
Psssst, June who works in accounting is pregnant again and the boss is pissed off about the timing. Brian? He only has that job because someone else got sick and there was no one else to appoint. Who’s the mystery creep-o, the person using the colour printer after hours to run off porn photos? The silent collective finger of the Mill pointed at a middle manager. Then there was the worst speculation: Who has slept with the boss? One woman, who was confrontational and largely disliked, became the target – which to the Mill neatly explained why she wasn’t fired.
One day I’d had enough with this venomous gossip. I went for drinks after work with two office friends whose “what the hell?” glances and shared eye-rolls during meetings told me they were also fed up. A martini-fuelled pact emerged that night: we wouldn’t talk trash about each other or anyone else at the office. We decided to see what would happen if we Just Said No. It went like this: Someone tells me something about you that bothers me, I promise to talk about it with you instead of behind your back. Someone baits me with trash, I blankly say “Huh?” – as if I don’t know what they’re talking about. This wasn’t about being dumb. It was about playing dumb. That ignorant “huh” means that I don’t care. Find someone else to talk to, snake-mouth.
It’s funny when someone comes to you with a particularly dirty piece of gossip and you listen politely, then innocently mumble, “Huh?” and turn back to your computer. First you become the object of the gossip: something is wrong with her. The first accusation lobbed at me was that I was sleeping with the boss. Right, that’s why I was given a raise and the office with a window. It had nothing to do with, you know, my work. The Mill threw the best they had at me and it bounced right off. The rumour reached my two friends, who listened to this juicy bit of trash, then each responded with a flat “Huh?”
We had disrupted the channel! Plugged the flow of information! That is the beauty of opting out of workplace gossip. It didn’t matter if these people think I had slept with the boss (I didn’t, for the record.) because our pact operated under the premise “Who cares?” And people, over time, appeared not to care. For my two friends and me, the rumours might as well have not existed. I was safe and I could work unfettered by this crap, at least with two other people.
The best part of opting out was unexpected. See, we had allies ready to take the pact. They saw what we were doing and began to say “Huh?” too. Soon the real culprits emerged. Over the next 18 months, the no-gossip movement at our office reached a critical mass, and the gossipers became increasingly marginalized. The three remaining gossips had no one to talk trash to except each other. And the rest of us were free to get on with our work. U
Category: Career Track, First Job, Management, Work
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