Monday Confession

The things you keep from your colleague...

Confession#11:

After I graduated, I was lucky enough to secure a job very fast. If it were up to me, I would have taken a few months rest before I even started job hunting. Of course, you can only plan. I'm not from a well off family which made finding a job compulsory. And so I started my first day as a working adult a day after I finished my last final exam. It was March 2005. I was 24 and naive.

My first work was in shipping line. I had quite a hard time adjusting to my new life and finding new friends. No surprise there I guess. 3 years later, I'm still working for the same company though now doing a different job functions. 3 years passed by and I only have one colleague that I'm quite close with. Her name is Joan. She's my age and started work a year after me. I talk to her more than all the talking I did with the other colleagues combined. But there are still certain things that not even Joan knows.

When I first started work, I lied about having a boyfriend to avoid going on a date with a co-worker who gave me the creep. I could have told him upfront that I wasn't interested, but I wanted something hard and sharp that worked immediately for the kill. Like I said, he gave me the creep. It did effectively ended his interest and his advances on me, but that one little lie continued spreading among my colleagues until I got tangled in a web. Mind you, I only told the guy's friend in hope that he'd relay it to him. And relay the news he did.

As it turned out, he was quite a gossiper and soon, all of my colleagues found out that I had a 'boyfriend'. I had to invent a story about how we met, how long we've been dating, where he's from, blah, blah, blah. Quite soon, I acquired myself a sweet, good looking (of course) 2 years older boyfriend whom I met when I was doing study exchange program. We were dating long distance (again, of course) and kept in touch through emails mostly. In all, I had a happy relationship. If only they knew.

I usually don't care much about other people's business, so I was amazed how interested they were in mine. Most of the time, I avoided talking about my non-existent love life, though I have to admit, at times it was funny to witness their eagerness in knowing other people's love lives. Mine, in this case.

However, soon enough, I got tired of having to fabricate one lie after another like why he wasn't calling, what usually we talked about, and gasp! when are we getting married. I was new in working life, so I didn't have any idea whether it was normal to ask quite a personal question to your new colleague. In the end, I decided to 'break up' with my boyfriend saying that distance was the main problem. When they asked more, I said I didn't want to talk about it.

That was the end of my last 'relationship'. No one knew I didn't have a boyfriend. Or heartbroken in the least. Joan doesn't know mostly because it happened before we started working together. But, the only thing I regretted about the whole thing is that I told the first original lie to a gossip monger.