Gossip Girls

Well this is not about the series which I have never watched. This is more about garden variety grapevine. This post was in the drafts for quite sometime now and I had almost forgotten about it, but I met one of them recently, so decided to post it. This about those whines (pun intended) in the grapevine that attempt to strangle you. Here are the various types of gossip girls (and boys too). Enjoy!

1. The relationship expert : This person knows all about who is seeing whom, who is sleeping with whom and at exactly what level of dating someone is. They find great pleasure in letting others know about the latest IT couple. Breakups, makeups, make outs real and imagined, you can get all the information in typical soap opera full with dialogues when you ask them. Said person is generally married or in a stable relationship so a lot of first timers actually believe every word that comes from their mouth. Said person actually never speaks about their life much, maybe their own relationship life isnt really crackling.

2. The empathiser/guide : This individual generally comes across as an angel when you are going through some personal shit. He/she will be very nice to you, listen to you always, even encourage you by telling you how you are right and others are wrong. You are almost taken in by the goodness and you would end up spilling the beans about your miseries. Next thing you know, your most personal anguish is all known to everyone, sometimes they don’t name you, sometimes they do, but the details are all there and infact travel back to you in the form of questions about your well being.

3. The Q & A expert : This one I met recently. This person would meet you after ages and ask with some level of curiosity in a manner of catching up with you all sorts of pokey questions like ‘so did you get a raise?’ ‘are you getting married soon?’ ‘is your boss treating you well?’ Mind you these are people who can fake idle curiosity, they might seem like people who are sort of trying to get back in touch after a long time, but also remember that these people arent really interested, if they were they would keep in touch with you regularly.

4. The why of it : This is the kind of person who tries to find links to everything everyone does. Oohh he went to the boss’ cabin, surely he has gone to lick ass about that new project, hmm so she is going to lunch with him, surely it is because romance is brewing, ohhhh these two are meeting for coffee surely they are ganging up against someone else and so on they cook up stories and spread it around.

5. The shameless : These are the ones who will come up to you or your friends and ask you pointblank about the latest thing they have heard about you. These are the kinds who don’t realise that personal things would be shared only with friends, not with random passersby. They want to know and they will persist, if not from you, from your friends or someone else, they have to get their dose of the addiction or life loses all meaning.

6. The office spy : This is the person who finds professional linkages and is also up to date on who was hired/fired/reprimanded etc etc. This person talks with much authority about who is efficient, who is inefficient, who is going to go far and who is trash professionally. This person at times also infuses the characteristics of the relationship expert and guide to extract maximum information and provide maximum fodder.

7. The carriers : These are those people who have always heard from so and so, or just heard what happened. No first person account or interpretation, these are the Chinese whisperers and some of the most judgemental ones at that.

Its all about appearances anyways, who cares what you really are. If they start caring then they wont be able to pass time because well nothing interesting is happening to them anyways and everyone’s got to do something to make their own lives feel better right? Yes pulling you down makes them feel socially/morally/financially/whateverly better. And in case you are wondering, I did write this to feel good (wink).