Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Snared in a web of my own making

It is amazing to me, how the gossip can circulate in the aid world. And I know, I am, without a doubt, the worst offender of this, getting on to Skype and Facebook and sending out priority 1 "OMG did you hear, Yvette in Laos is totally sleeping with Gerald in Tanzania and Raoul in Kabul is furious" types of messages to people in 10 different countries within seconds of receiving any whisper of a rumor.

I have friends who will immediately drop whatever they are doing to tell me some piece of news in an effort to catch me out, to tell me something first. I think that has happened, maybe, twice.

This obsession with the romantic lives of colleagues whom we haven't seen in years, people we barely know and friends of friends is unhealthy and a bit mean-spirited, yes, but it is also understandable. What the heck else will we talk about? We have no lives. Unless I want to have conversations only about LRA movements and Global Fund indicator development, I am pretty much forced to talk about Yvette and her wanton ways.

I am, at the moment, finding myself, very lightly, caught in this web of rumor and giggles and slyly worded e-mails. Which, you wold think, would make me vow never to gossip ever again, now that I am on the sharp end of innuendo and conjecture. Instead, I find myself intrigued, it is like a sociology experiment, trying to figure out what the connections are that lead to the information traveling around the world at such a shocking rate of speed.

Plus, I'd be a hypocrite if I denied people their tittering.

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