*NEWS*PRINTERS COPIERS AND LOTS OF GOSSIP

[Anonymous]

Printers, copiers are wellsprings of office gossip
You might think Deb Allen’s life-altering discovery at work last year would have led to a flood of gossip.
Swamped
with work at an asset-management firm, she went into the office over
the weekend and found a document abandoned on the glass of the copy
machine. The document contained the base compensation, raises,
performance ratings and bonus information for 80 of her colleagues.The
gossip well in most offices rarely runs dry thanks in part to some of
the biggest tattlers: the copy machine, fax and group printer. And
Allen had uncovered the kind of information that might trigger a
white-collar riot at many companies.She was certainly outraged that a
noted screwup was making $65,000 a year more than more competent
colleagues, while some new hires were earning almost $200,000 more than
their counterparts with more experience. The discovery led her to
question why she was working weekends for less pay. “I just couldn’t
stand the inequity of it,” she says. Three months later she quit.But
Allen couldn’t bring herself to share the information with colleagues.
“I would have been better off not knowing any of that,” she explains.
“I couldn’t give it to people who were still working there because it
would make them depressed, like it made me depressed.”Gossip has its
appeal, and researchers say it can serve a positive social function,
bonding communities, for example. But barring some good news about an
ally or negative scuttlebutt about an enemy, there seems to come a time
when many people would prefer to remain out of the loop.It isn’t that
we grow out of gossip. But at the office, it’s as if we’re guarding
whatever respect we have left for our colleagues and our employer.
Getting any data of a personal nature – any facedown document on any
office machine – might be intriguing, but it could be very creepy, or
even the last straw.Tabitha Brown, a purchasing administrator, didn’t
mind learning through a document left on the fax machine that one of
her colleagues was preparing for gastric bypass surgery. “I was nosy
and read most of the letter,” she says. But there are limits to her
curiosity. “If it were something scandalous, like an affair, that would
bother me,” she says.It doesn’t mean you are a prude if you are turned
off by the thought of accidental disclosures about your colleagues’
sexual appetites. Every so often, the computer folks at Michael Fox’s
architectural firm rotate computers, giving the more powerful ones to
the people who need them most.Fox recounts how he got a hand-me-down
that contained an “astonishingly large” collection of adult
pornography. He says he found it unnerving. “God knows what these
people do in their free time!” he says. “You think you know them.”It
wasn’t so much that the content offended him. “If I were 30 years
younger, it would have been voyeuristically amusing,” he says. But he
was dismayed that a trusted colleague would be so foolish as to hoard
pornography at work. In the end, he deleted all the files and told no
one – well, almost no one – about them.Jack Levin, a professor of
criminology and sociology at Northeastern University who has studied
gossip, suggests that a taste for it may fade in part because work is
part of our identity and colleagues are part of work. “When we learn
something negative about someone at the office, in a sense it reflects
badly on us,” he says.There are also limits to how much distressing
information we can stand in the tight confines of an office
community.”We tend to think people go out of their way to find out
negative things,” Levin says. “But most people don’t want to belittle
or disparage their friends and neighbors.” In his studies, he has found
that only a third of gossip is negative, while the rest is neutral or
positive in equal parts.When Emily Pellegrini was younger, hearsay
about her superiors conferred a level of status that she wouldn’t have
otherwise had. “Now that I’m older, I don’t want to know what they’re
doing, and I hope to God they don’t want to know what I’m doing,” says
the programming software trainer.Last month she saw a misfired fax from
an insurance company that approved a colleague’s policy, although it
said the person was a “high risk” because of driving-while-intoxicated
incidents.”That’s information that I could definitely share with anyone
in the office,” she says. But she hasn’t. “I realized my life is
happier not knowing all the dirty little secrets that go on with my
co-workers,” she says.

[Author]

July 17, 2006 at 10:59 AM