Outed at work

I had a work lunch today with a man that was, for all intents and purposes, an absolute arse – seriously. But, he is a friend of my boss and a man that we could potentially do business with in the future, so the two of us headed over the road to Hawksmoor for steak and what I thought would be some work related chat.

            Unfortunately, due to his fairly close friendship with my boss, chat centred mostly on general banter and news sharing, so when the issue of online dating came up (my boss finds The Word Smith story utterly hilarious and feels the need to share it with pretty much everyone) we ended up dwelling on it for quite some time. The guy we were meeting used Guardian Soulmates when he was online dating a couple of years ago, and as such, felt the need to ask me a barrage of questions about who I was finding, and requested to see all their profiles.

            Having shared a couple of comedy stories whilst point blank refusing to share my or their profile details with him, we went out separate ways so that we could finish up a couple of bits of work before the end of the afternoon.

            Two hours back in the office, and I received the following email (with my boss cc’ed): “I would have thought you could have come up with a more imaginative name than Miss P?!” with my profile content copied below.

            Now I’m not a crazily private person, and the fact that I have shared the most entertaining stories from my online ventures with my office goes to show that I’m not ashamed of the fact that I’m online and making a bit of a hash of it. That said, there is something about a couple of paragraphs where you shameless attempt to sell yourself that’s incredibly personal, and if there is one group of people that don’t need to have access to it, it’s the boys I work with. I get that’s it’s sort of funny, and that in refusing to show him my profile I was just adding to the entertainment factor of the hunt for him, but still, did my boss need to see it?

            One of the main fears of each and everyone of the Sluts when we were discussing making profiles and getting them online was that someone you know might find you on there – either when they’re looking for dates or just for the comedy value of publically humiliating you, but I don’t think anyone thought it would be a work related ousting.  Fortunately, I seem to have reached a point in life where nothing much will shame me into submission. Still, I don’t think I’ll be going for lunch with that guy again, whether there’s steak on offer or not!