I’ve heard my fair share of office rumors – X is going out with Y, W is cheating on her husband and Z is apple-polishing for a promotion and so on. You know the stuff. But I have to say the weirdest office rumor I ever heard was actually about myself.

You see, somebody told me that I was dead. Thankfully to paraphrase Mark Twain “the reports of my death were greatly exaggerated.”

It happened during my divorce, or rather just after my divorce. I took off from work and had what my kids considered a nervous breakdown in slow motion (taking up surfing, wandering off for long hours on my own).

Because I hadn’t answered phone calls and emails from friends for a week or so and also because there was an accidental tragic drowning of a surfer at the beach I was known to be frequenting, somehow word got around my workplace that I had been the victim.

An anxious email hinting at depression-induced suicide sent by an office colleague to another group of people in the office was accidentally copied to me. When I did log onto my PC a couple of days later, I found out about the rumors of my supposed demise. It was the funniest thing I had heard in months and I laughed till my sides ached and the tears came!