Business English: My colleague is blogging that I'm dim and smarmy

A male Advertising Executive (31) wrote: One of my workmates writes a popular blog. She doesn't sign it, but it is a very thinly disguised account of what happens in our office and one of the characters is based on me... von Lucy Kellaway, London

... right down to the sort of clothes I wear and the way I speak. The portrait is extremely unflattering - I'm portrayed as dim and smarmy. I find this hurtful and also fear it's damaging to my reputation.

She flatly denied writing it when I asked her. Is there anything I can do?

Read what Lucy Kellaway, "agony-aunt" of the Financial Times (London), answered:

Before the age of the internet, people used to laugh at their colleagues behind their backs. Now, they laugh in their faces. Anyone can start a blog and write whatever they like. This, surely, is a very bad business. It's cyber-bullying and must stop.

But actually it is a lot less horrific than it seems. Cyber-bullying among children is (arguably) a serious matter. If a 10-year-old writes, "X is fat and smelly and has bad breath", then it's pretty horrid. If an adult writes, "X is dim and smarmy and wears stupid clothes", it makes the author look more pathetic than the subject. For it to be damaging it needs to work as satire, and this is very difficult to pull off.

Lucy Kellaway

Satire has to be close to the truth yet twisting in just the right way to make it funny. If this blog is popular it would seem that this woman is one of the few who knows how to do it. Satire also needs to have a big target. Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Madonna are considered worth satirising. A nobody is not. You should, therefore, take your starring role on this blog as a compliment.

Hopefully I did not hurt someone

Yet, despite writing these consoling paragraphs, I'm still feeling a bit uncomfortable about your problem. I've spent the past 15 years intermittently satirising colleagues and I hope I haven't hurt any of them too badly. It does, however, mean that I know the difference between a response that has class and one that has none.

Mehr zum Thema

To confront her like that was not classy. I suggest you put it behind you. Instead, I recommend that you adopt one of two stances in future.

Two ways out

The first is to keep a dignified silence. The trouble is that there is a thin line between dignified silence and hurt silence, which isn't classy either.

The second is that you put yourself inside the joke. Pretend to see it as funny. I once satirised someone in a weekly column who took to saying to me: "So, what am I up to this week?" The fact that the target appeared to be enjoying the joke meant that I quickly stopped enjoying it myself. I dropped the character soon after and picked on someone else instead.

Aus der Financial Times, London. www.ft.com