AT WORK, A VIRTUAL PLOT

You, uncensored
A small bit of personal information or a large picture album on your online profile has the potential to cause you trouble or embarrassment in office. Your colleague has access to information which you otherwise may not share with him, such as your relationship status, the communities you join, the fun applications you use, your photo albums, the videos you forward and the comments you write or receive on your Facebook wall or Orkut scrapbook. Thus making your online profile a fertile ground for office gossip.

Priyanka Sachar’s Facebook photographs in which she wore a bright red top, a black skirt and let loose her long tresses—a contrast to her Plain Jane image in office—invited comments such as “hot”, “seductress”, “nice legs”, “sultry” and “my screen is burning” from her male colleagues on the site. “Yes, I wanted to show my photos to my friends, but this was not what I expected,” says the 31-year-old project manager in a Gurgaon-based IT company. People from other departments came up to her and said the photographs were the “talk of the office” and gave her unsolicited advice to delete them.

Writing on the Wall
The main online source of office gossip is your Facebook wall or Orkut scrapbook. Ali Khan, a mechanical engineer in Bangalore, for instance, was romantically linked to a co-worker who wrote a birthday wish on his Orkut scrapbook at midnight. “The timing of her scrap—nobody else left a congratulatory message at midnight—coupled with the fact that it was long and loaded with emotions made the two of us a ‘couple’ in office,” he says. Pavan Kumar Adapa, a market analyst with HSBC in Bangalore, had to frequently log on to Facebook to delete comments on his wall that asked about his impending job change. “I was looking for a change for over two months before joining HSBC a fortnight ago. My non-office friends would ask me about my search. And I was afraid my colleagues would come to know of my plans to switch over,” he says.

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