A conversation in the office just now has raised some interesting questions. A colleague just told us that his wife once found a file called salary.xls on a shared drive. I asked ‘did she look at it?’ to which he replied ‘she agonised over it but couldn’t resist in the end’. For me, I don’t think I would have looked, not for any high moral reasons, but rather because I’d rather not know. What use is to me to know if someone is earning more or less than me – I can hardly use this information to my benefit – so what’s the point. I just think its of no use to me whatsover.
After expressing this to my colleague he said ‘yes it’s like that thing in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy which tells you your ranking in the universe’ and I think he’s hit the nail on the head there – it’s too depressing to discover where you rank in terms of monetary worth.
