Gossip, Infidelity, and My Brain

My brain is weird.

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time - or, well, at all, really - you probably already figured that out. That said, I'm still fascinated by the particular ways that my brain can be weird.

So yesterday I learned that one of my co-workers is, um, boinking someone that he shouldn't be. He shouldn't be boinking her because he's already married to someone else, and because she's already married to someone else.

Normally, I wouldn't know about this. I tend to be blissfully unaware of these things - partly out of disinterest, and partly because I don't always process social cues. Also, normally I wouldn't care. I have better things to do with my time and attention.

However, owing to the way I learned about it, I only found out who the guy was.

This, apparently, completely bypasses my customary indifference and triggers an intense curiosity instead. I think it's the incomplete nature of the information; if they'd just come in and said, "Oh, X and Y are sleeping with each other," I'd probably have just nodded and gone on with my day. But being told that "X is sleeping with, um, someone in another department," immediately made me want to know: "Really? Whom?"

Well, okay, not immediately. It immediately made me want to slap the shit out of him, because he really should know better. But right after that, it made me want to know whom he was boinking.

It took about half an hour to find out. Apparently I was one of maybe three people in our workplace who hadn't heard about it already. That half an hour was, frankly, way more attention than the issue deserved, and mostly involved finding a discreet source of information. But now that I know, I can set the information safely behind an S.E.P. Field and get on with my life.