I have no proof. Indeed I rather hope I'm wrong. But I have a sneaking suspicion she might have stumbled upon it by mistake, and put two and two together, and be popping back for regular updates on my life.
I don't go round at work advertising that I have a blog. What I write has bugger all to do with work, and I don't think it's an especially wise move to mix the two. I never fire up diamond geezer on my monitor, not even a sneaky peek when I think nobody's looking. Indeed I've never ever written my blog in the office, nor logged in to Blogger on a corporate computer, not once in the last ten years. I like to keep work for work, and publishing stuff on the internet for home, with a strict dividing line inbetween.
Nevertheless I suspect my boss is reading my blog. It's my own fault. Normally I write about disparate stuff, nerdy stuff, you know the sort of thing. But a while back I made the mistake of writing about something local the boss is really interested in, without stopping to think that she might be really interested in it. I thought I was writing about something obscure and niche, but it turned out to be a niche with rather broader appeal. Anyone as enthusiastic as my boss would undoubtedly have noticed it, and clicked through and read it, and maybe assumed I wrote about that sort of stuff all the time. And from there it would have been only one small step to noticing everything else.
A few months later we were chatting at work, my boss and I, and she suddenly brought up a topic I've championed on the blog. Hmm, I thought, that's an unlikely conversational topic, about which my boss appears to know rather too much. This was immediately followed up by another off-the-wall London nugget, again something I've blogged about frequently but which isn't especially widely known. Whoa, I thought, two direct hits in two minutes! Can that be a coincidence? Or is she deliberately prodding, probing, testing to see if I'll react and confess. I didn't react, obviously, let alone confess. Neither was any other pertinent conversation forthcoming, so the entire encounter soon faded away. But it did leave me with a nagging doubt, wondering, repeatedly, is she now keeping tabs on everything I do?
I'd rather colleagues at work didn't know how nerdy my outside life gets. I'd rather they didn't know I'd spent the weekend on a bus, or visiting some geeky spot in the suburbs, or walking ten miles to an obscure museum. I'd rather they didn't look at me in the morning and go "seriously, you so need to get a life". I'd undoubtedly stop blogging the more personal stuff the minute I thought my words were circulating widely in the office. I'd more than likely start censoring the majority of other topics too, rather than risk face-to-face scrutiny and humiliation in a professional context. So if my boss is indeed reading my blog, as I suspect, that's not good. But if I ever found out that she was reading my blog, well, that would be worse.
If you are my boss and you're reading this, hello. Please don't hold my online exploits against me, or look at me in a funny way in the morning after I've posted something extreme. I'm not always like that. But, most importantly, please never ever mention that you've read today's post. You may know all about my blog, but I don't want to know that you know, because that would irrevocably change what I write about. Say nothing, drop no hints, don't even look up from your monitor right now and give me a sly bemused look. Pretend we've never had this conversation, and carry on as normal. Let's maintain this charade where you know, and I know you know, and now you know I know you know, but without ever reaching the stage where I know you know I know you know. It's better that way, for everyone's sake.
(for the avoidance of doubt, I flipped a coin before writing this to decide whether my boss would appear as male or female) (if my boss is reading my blog, there's a 50% chance he flipped out long before reading this far down today's post) (sorry, but ssssh anyway, say nothing, thanks)
