Today's work gossip

My office is just over the corridor from the sales people; there's technically two at the moment, but one has been on sick leave for a week - he was, apparently, in hospital last week. The position of the office means that I can overhear quite well when the doors are open, but it's easy enough to tune out. But for some reason, I found myself listening in on a conversation that the saleswoman was having. It was one of those where you overhear the odd word, I think, and your subconscious prods you to let you know that actually, you might want to pay some attention here. As it transpires, it wasn't a client she was speaking to. She'd ended up with the call because the chap who initially took the call thought it was a customer calling up to complain about the service. It turns out that no, it was someone phoning up to complain about the currently-absent salesman. It was someone who knows him socially, who was calling us because he didn't have another contact number for him. He made a number of allegations that I'm not going to repeat here, because they're slanderous (well, I guess since I'm typing them, they'd be libellous, but you know what I mean.) Suffice it to say that she called her manager to let him know about this; and he promptly called back to inform her that she shouldn't say anything to anyone. Of course, by then it was rather too late; and of course no one's asked me not to say anything. But I was very interested in a couple of the other comments the saleswoman had to say. For one thing, when she's phoning to try and sell our services to prospective clients, she's not allowed to mention other clients by name. We don't give out details of satisfied customers (the official reason is that they don't want them to be poached by other service providers; but there's a part of me wondering if perhaps it's because we don't have any.) Considering that there are a dozen people in the organisation, communications are frankly appalling, and it looks like this is an actual policy, rather than sheer incompetence as I'd assumed. I also got the chance to chat with our former system administrator this evening, too. He's very much enjoying his new job, and he mentioned that he'd been asked, specifically, not to mention that he was going to anyone. He did anyway, mind you, on the grounds of, well, what could they do to him? I should also say that when I got back from my most recent trip to Tennessee, I was taken out to a site visit by the boss, who asked me how I thought everything was going; and mentioned that he was going to be taking me on as an actual employee (yay!) with more money (double yay!); and that the paperwork would be sorted by the end of the week. That was now two weeks ago, so it's currently over a week late (and if you're wondering, no, I've not heard a peep about it since.) I'm going to give him a couple more weeks to see if he comes through; and if he doesn't, I shall be leaving - it's just not worth the amount of stress that I'm getting. The amusing part is that since he never bothered to give me a contract, I don't believe that I'm actually obliged to give him any notice at all....