Whatever the prevailing opinion about a person in my general orbit is, I can practically guarantee you I don’t know it. I don’t know if it’s a holdover from my socially-impoverished childhood or what, but the “everybody knows” tidbits pass me right on by.
Much of the time this is a good thing, because what “everybody knows” is false or pointlessly mean-spirited or both. I heard some stuff at orientation that I wish I hadn’t (and certainly shan’t pass along). There’s plenty enough mean in the world that I don’t need to bathe in more of it.
Probably just as well I’m none too cognizant of my own reputation in a few circles, for that matter. The same people purveying the petty meannesses I’m keeping to myself doubtless have me pegged as “annoying but harmless loudmouth, nowhere near as smart as she thinks she is.”
On the whole, I’m not sorry that I mostly form my own opinions of people without benefit (using the term loosely) of gossip. I keep more doors open that way, come into new situations without jaundice—and as jaundiced as I am, that’s a not inconsiderable good.
Every once in a while, though, I lose out. At orientation, I ran into a new SLISter who is also a current denizen of the Department from Hell. “I wish I could just bring them all down here to see what orientation ought to be like!” she said to me.
“They’re more than welcome,” I grinned, “but somehow I don’t think it likely they’d show.”
Naturally we got to swapping stories. Some things are changing over there, terribly slowly; at the very least, the dog-eat-dogness amongst the students is fading into a more cooperative atmosphere. (I appear to have started it, at least in part. The little mini-library I left for future master’s students is still in place and expanding, I’m told. Well, go me and go them.) Trying to place me in the department’s history, she asked who my adviser had been, and who was running the department at the time. “Dr. B, at least to start,” I answered to both questions. “He never did learn my name.”
She nodded wisely. “He never learns women’s names,” she said.
Oh. Um, how did I miss that bit? Because, man, a lot of things about that department suddenly clicked right into place, not least some mildly grunchy things from other professors that a department chair committed to a friendly environment wouldn’t have allowed. (Nothing like these horror stories, thank heaven, but nothing good, either.) Miss it I did, however, no credit to my good sense.
Sometimes it just takes me too long to come to the same negative opinion of someone that everybody else has always had; I won’t do it until I’m flattened outright into a corner with nothing to do but lash out. Such was my history with Neurotic Ex-Boss. Everybody but me, it seems, knew trouble was in the offing when he got promoted to management. A coworker driving me home from a work event soon afterward delicately tried to extract my opinion; I was as happy and optimistic as I could be. In hindsight, I quite see how dubious she was about the whole thing.
Eh, well, long story short, she was right (as was popular opinion) and I was wrong and I didn’t realize it until Neurotic Ex-Boss had driven me right ’round the bend. Ironic, that. The one person genuinely happy for him, ready and willing to support him, was the first person he trained his sights on.
There’s got to be a happy medium in here somewhere, between wilful cluelessness and caving to random gossip, but I confess I haven’t found it yet.
