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.

More than anything else, walls and scrapbooks have become places to bitch about your colleagues, quite often with real consequences. “There have been plenty of stories lately involving behaviour that is completely inappropriate for a work environment. People need to realise that even virtual actions can have very real consequences,” Cristina Hoole of LinkedIn was quoted by The Sun as saying.

Gossip café
Log into community groups of various companies on Orkut and you’ll see discussion boards full of boss-bashing, all done anonymously. Topics like “Who is the biggest a**h*le in CP/HLAG?” (in the CP-HapagLloyd Global Services community on Orkut) or “Who is Who’s Crush” (in the Siemens Power Engineering community) abound. These threads, unlike others, have heavy traffic. One such thread, “Hot Office Updates” in the Teletech India community, at 256 messages, is one of the most active. Communities also hold online polls that ask contentious questions with even more contentious options. For instance, the poll “Why employees are quitting” in the Pantaloon Retail community has the options, “low salary”, “less growth opportunity” and “selfishness of seniors”.

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