Anatomy of a Rumor

Week zero: 

It all started on a Friday afternoon.  D had stopped by my desk to chat.  I was walking to the cafeteria with her, when she leans in and asks, "have you heard the latest?"

No, I had not heard any rumors, but without her saying another word, I already knew who the rumors would be about.

There is a senior executive at the company where we work, who is, shall we say, not popular.  For this story, we will call this person V.  I have not had any meaningful direct contact with V, but from the contact I have had, I do not have a high opinion of V and I look forward to the day he or she will either (a) leave or (b) retire.

My opinions are shared by many others, too, which is why I guessed that "the latest" had to do with V.  Rumors of V's demise have been gossip fodder for years.  They have come and gone, with no substance behind them.  The first time I heard the rumor, I was excited by the prospect and the promise of a better day.  After the third or fourth time the rumors had made the rounds, I became like one of the townsfolk in "The boy who cried wolf", numb to their veracity.

  

As it turns out, "the latest" was on V, and like the rumors of the past, V would be leaving soon.  I didn't ask for D's source.  In the rumor spreading world, you don't ask.  Call it professional  courtesy.  Bob Woodword kept the identity of Deep Throat from Ben Bradley and Katherine Graham.  Besides, D has high credibility in my book. 

Week 1: Monday

I had mentioned the rumor to a friend, G, over the weekend.  G is working at my employer as a contract employee, on a project whose funding is dependent on V's support.  I felt I had to give him a heads up on the rumor, so that he might be able to find another assignment just in case the rumors were true.  On Monday, G used the internal instant messaging program, Sametime, to send me a note, to see if there was any more on the rumors.  I had almost forgotten about it, until his note.  I forgot that G, being new to the organization, was not immune to the rumor spreading.  No, I told him, nothing more had been said.

Week 1: Friday

I had lunch with K, a coworker in the division and a notorious rumor spreader.  Friday is a good day to catch up on news and the latest happenings, so I figured this would be a good chance to see what he knows.  K had spread a rumor of V's departure earlier in the year, claiming that V was being kicked out in a special board meeting.  There was in fact a special board meeting going on, but it was not to kick out V.  It was to change our retirement benefits, a far worse outcome than V's removal.

I asked K if he had heard any new rumors.  No he had not heard any rumors, and I could tell he was hurt, as there was a rumor circulating and he was not the source (or the cause).  This was slightly disturbing.  As I said, K spreads lots of rumors; most of the time he is just fishing for info.  Had he known about this particular rumor, it would have been easy to dismiss.  But as he looked at me with stunned silence, I began to think that maybe there was some truth to it.  I did not share with him what the rumor was; I consider myself a master of deflection, and I was able to change the topic quickly to something else.

Week 2:  Wednesday

I am in a Fantasy Football league with a lot of friends from the old corporate marketing group.  A funny consequence of my new job is that there are a lot of private calls I have to make.  Before, my office used to be wide open with people coming in and out; now, it is often closed.  Everyone assumes it is because of a deal I am working on.  In effect, yes this is true, but my deals lately have involved moving Steven Jackson off my roster for a quarterback.  Today my door was closed for another reason.  

I got a call from a friend in another division, we will call him F.  F also knows D, and is similarly well connected.  We had been trying to work out a fantasy deal over Sametime, but we were getting nowhere.  Still, we wanted to keep the conversation going so we might be able to reach an agreement. F pings me a note asking if I have "heard anything."  

Being paranoid over the monitoring systems at work, F gives me a call. What have I heard?  Same thing as you - V is on their way out.  I ask him what has he heard and who is his source. Courtesy be damned, I need to see if this is coming from D, or if this is a new source.  F heard V was being removed, the reason being a HR violation.  His source was someone from a division where neither D nor I work.  I share with him that I had heard the same rumor, but I didn't have a reason.  I also shared with him the division where my source originated, but not their name.  We promised to keep each other informed of any new developments.  An alliance was struck, at least in the rumor department.  As far as football, we were no where closer to making a deal (Steven Smith for Philip Rivers?  Pfft - forget it!)

Week 2: Friday

The rumor mill is in full effect today.  The rumblings of this week have gone into overdrive.  A coworker, O, came by to talk and hear if I have heard anything.  Yes, I have. He has heard the same rumor, but from two different people.  

One is from someone in a corporate staff function that heard the HR violation rumor, but with a new twist.  It had something to due with V's divorce.  Apparently, V's house was for sale.  We had all heard the stories that V had gotten a divorce, and that he or she was active on the on-line dating circuit.  

The on-line dating rumor for V was another rumor we had heard earlier in the year.  I had never seen it, but apparently, V had a profile up on-line for a while, until someone from corporate had advised them to take it down.  I had not seen this profile, but I was told it was open for the public to see.  Some of V's turn ons included erotica and an Asian fetish. I never believed this rumor, and when pressed, none of the rumor spreaders had actually seen it either.  But, they reassured me, they had good friends at work who had.

O's second source was a call from one of our sales managers in Chicago.  They heard the rumor from one of our distributors and customers.  It wasn't internal anymore; folks outside the company heard it too, so the rumor must be true!  Or so the thinking went this Friday.

Week 3:  Tuesday

I have lunch with J, a good friend who works in a division different from me or any of my fellow other rumor spreaders.  J and I usually have so much to talk about, that work never comes up, until today.  Tis the power of the rumors.  

She had heard the same rumors, and J in fact had a run in with V on the elevator not too long ago.  A creepy run in, too.  Without going into details, you could see why V is a target.  I don't think V is a bad person, but their mannerisms are such that it can lead you to thinking that they could participate in unsavory behavior.  Like the Richard Gere rumors, there is something about him which makes you think, maybe it is true...

J says that the rumor she heard was that V's contract would not be renewed when it expired, whenever that might be. 

Week 3: Wednesday

F calls with an update on the HR violation.  Apparently, V is being fired for downloading massive amounts of pornography on their work computer.  A few years ago, a sting operation at work fired six people, who had a massive porno file swapping operation going on.  This story I know is true; I know one of the people who got fired and several of the people who were hired to replace them.  The company takes this matter very seriously; almost every website is blocked by the "blue screen" of death which lets know when you hit something with racy content.  And it keeps count, too.

Suddenly, the rumor is now coming into focus.  It all added up:  The divorce, the online dating where V admitted a fondness for erotica, the previous terminations for pornography.... it was all making sense now.  We were through the looking glass, people.  How could we have been so blind for so long?  Everyone was convinced that it was only a matter of time before V was let go.  The question was when.  All the signs pointed to Friday.

Week 3: Thursday

Work in our area is suffering as the rumors are the hot topic of conversation.  The "porno rumor" was by far the most popular, which evoked the response of "why didn't V download it on their home computer, like any decent person would?"  

Still, there were proponents of the "contract not being renewed" theory.  This would fit the Minnesota mold better; rather than taking direct action or causing a disturbance, we just wait it out and then let them go without an explanation.  

Week 3:  Friday

This was D-day, the day it was all supposed to go down.  Depending on whose rumor you heard or believed, V would be let go today.  Plans were underway within the division for a celebratory happy hour, which might start at noon. 

12 noon had been the popular consensus of when the termination would take place, though others insisted it would not be till end of day.  Some rumor spreaders said it would be earlier in the day, like at 10 am.  And according to one report, V had in fact been escorted out of the building already, after being given 5 minutes to clean our his or her desk.  

In any event, this was to be the day.

Yet nothing happened.  The day passed by without incident.  Not a peep.  Calls were made to contacts, but nothing happened.  V was still here.  No escorting occurred.

Week 4: Monday

Inquiries began and the news wires were being checked to see if something had been released externally before it hit the internal employees.  This has happened before.  I have received eMails from friends outside the company who ask me about major personnel changes that they have read about on news sites, which had not yet been released on the internal systems.  But nothing was discovered.  

Reliable contacts were in short supply. Questions were being asked, but no answers were forthcoming.

Week 4: Wednesday

People were still asking questions; how could V still be here?   Was everyone wrong?  How could this have happened?  All the evidence was there and it all made sense? Did we get the wrong week?  Would it be this Friday, not last?  

Week 4: Friday

No termination for V this week.  We rumor spreaders were still despondent.  How could we have been so wrong?  It was like a challenge to our faith, like we had been worshiping the wrong god.

Supporters of the "contract theory" were still holding out.  Apparently, V's contract ran through the end of the year, so he or she would not be released until then.  For the rest who believed the other theories, the reality set in that V would be here a bit longer.  The celebration had been premature.  The boy had falsely cried wolf again.

Week 5:

Everyone's attention moved from the rumors to the company's falling stock price, which was mirroring the overall crash on Wall Street.  At this point, it was still early in the crisis, so we would not realize how bad the situation would be (or has yet to become).  We went back to work as normal.  Even if V had been fired, the work we had been avoiding still had to be done.

Some time this week we get a company wide eMail from V regarding the crisis on Wall Street and our company's financial position.  You could tell from the size of the file that this would be a very long eMail.  I read through it to see if there would be any hint which indicated they would be leaving.  But no, no hint, nor any inkling of a hint that V was going anywhere.  Just like the company where we work, both of them had taken hits, but nobody was going anywhere.

The eMail was a bit confusing, though.  A lot of discussion on a lot of topics that were not very well structured.  I discussed it with a former manager, L, who also had trouble grasping the note the first time through.  L and I are on a friendly basis, though because he was my manager in the past, we have never moved completely into a casual friendship.  Our relationship is still businesslike.  I never spoke with him about the rumors and stories; our talk is more about the issues facing the division.  

After much discussion of the eMail, we agreed that a lot of it could have been cut out and trimmed down.  As we were wrapping up,  L leaned over and said, "you know, when I saw the size of the file, I figured V must have included some of the porn they had downloaded.  You know, if you believe all the rumors."