Who are you?

How well do we actually know our work colleagues? It occured to me today that there is a kind of filter through which we see our colleagues, which they put in place and which we in turn put in place to filter their view of us.

I suppose that, to some extent, this is true of all forms of social interaction, but I think it's truer still of colleagues, because (usually) you only get to see them in one sphere of their lives. 'Work' is a very rigid environment, with lots of rules and expected behaviours and patterns of interaction. There are boundaries on what you can talk about with colleagues, and boundaries on how close you can get (socially and physically) to them (unless you develop a relationship/friendship with them outside of work, but that's a different sphere). It seems something of a shame sometimes, because I think some colleagues would make excellent friends (although they may not feel the same about me).

But anyway, the filter...

People at work, can, to some extent, choose how they present themselves, in terms both of their physical appearance and the information they choose to reveal about themselves. It's kind of like a blog or personal website really - somewhere you can potentially let people see just the 'good' aspects of yourself and handily omit the less attractive ones.

In reality, this only works to a certain extent in the work situation, because people's personalities are quite diffiult to hide, unless they have some sort of pathological disorder (?), or they have particularly insensitive or unobservant colleagues.

In some places, where there isn't much interaction between colleagues I expect you could pretty much hide your entire true personality, maybe your entire life outside of work, from your fellow workers.