National Anti-Bullying Week (day 5) - precautions

OK, so you can’t be cured, and you are fully informed. If Organisational Terrorism was easy, no-one would do it, would they? Therefore, the final message of the week is – take sensible precautions.

Pay close attention. Today’s offering from the Dog n’ Duck is longer than usual, but it could literally save your life.

You must invest in essential basic kit. Around £30 will get you a decent MP3 recorder. To put it into perspective, that is not much more than SCC spent on investment advice before slinging £25,000,000 of our money into the North Atlantic.

These devices have powerful microphones that can record anything from intimate conversations to multiple participant meetings in rooms the size of Roger’s office. The microphones are about the size of a pin head, and the whole gadget looks (and works) like one of those memory sticks that office people wear around their necks these days. (Hey – maybe they are all Potential Organisational Terrorists!)

Dangling from your neck like an “ordinary” memory stick is the ideal place for such a device. But if you’re worried (or if you have a stick that flashes to warn everyone that they are recording) then the top pocket of a jacket works perfectly well. They record through cloth, no problem. It helps to keep it high enough to be above any tables or other physical obstructions, but even that is not essential….

…. because, and this is the really clever bit, you can download, free from the web, simple software that magically transforms your recordings. For those of us who learned our spy craft during the Cod War this is truly astonishing. In the old days you ended up with a tape of mush and crackle, with your own voice booming and everyone else’s just a murmur. You had to take this to the Anoraks down in the basement, and they would curse and mutter and spend all night wearing headphones and twiddling knobs to get you an incomplete and often useless transcript.

Nowadays all you do is open the digital recording in your chosen software, and click the button that says something like “clean up sound”. All the mush disappears and the incriminating words from the other side of the room come through loud and clear – you can even recognise whose voices are speaking!

Down at the Dog n’ Duck we have tested this technology extensively. We can assure you that it works and that it is easy to use. We recommend it unreservedly to anyone who works for an Excellent organisation.

Dog n’ Duck HOT TIP! Always use uncompressed formats (e.g. .WAV) for your initial recording. The files are bigger but they are much easier to clean up.

It is particularly useful to have a recording of all those meetings that never took place. That way if you are accused of having dreams, hallucinations or delusions, or even of making things up - you can simply play the recording back to yourself. This is helpful when you have to prove that you are in fact sane, and that the organisation’s groupies are suffering from collective amnesia (a common side effect of Excellence).

Official Dog n’ Duck Legal Advice! – join the Union, that way you might get help if Excellence dictates that you are an Organisational Terrorist and that you must be got rid of.

However, we recognise that some people are too important (or too scaredy-cats!) to join the Union, and so for them …

Dog n’ Duck HOT TIP! You can get personal legal cover with your house insurance, it costs peanuts but can literally save your life.

Employment Lawyers in Somerset are currently charging OTs £235 per hour … plus VAT - which the Excellent organisation can recover, but you can’t (see why we are so anxious to guide people away from Organisational Terrorism? The dice are loaded against you in every little way imaginable.)

So you rack up costs at £2,071 per day while struggling to get out of the slurry pit. Meanwhile the Excellent organisation, which recently admitted that it was sitting on £1,000,000,000 of our money, racks up costs at only £1,762 per day (less any discounts they get as a result of their Excellent Procurement Strategy). Who is going to run out of money first?

Even if you are not remotely interested in perpetrating an Act of Organisational Terror, and are not even on the County Hall POT register, it is wise to take these basic precautions.

And all because, to quote the core message of National Anti-Bullying Week, you never know when you too may be branded an Organisational Terrorist.