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Army Jimbo's official guide

To blamestorming

Blamestorming. It’s one of those new fandangled catchwords that’s floating around these days and nobody’s safe from it (to clarify – nobody’s safe from the practice of blamestorming. The word, on the other hand, is quite harmless).

Blamestorming is nothing new. Back in my day we called it “passing the buck”. Of course, back in my day there were a lot more bucks around – laying about on the side of the road, in the supermarket, the kitchen cupboard next to the stove, that sort of thing. These days you’re lucky to find one and if you do, I’d recommend holding onto it – you never know when it might come in handy. But maybe I’m getting sidetracked.

So blamestorming. Here’s what I don’t like about it – it’s too simple. Once upon a time there was some pride to be taken in remaining calm when things started to go awry, then carefully, without anyone seeing you do it, passing - the - buck. These days it’s all about making lots of noise and pointing the finger and leaving angry phone messages and boisterous e-mails and generally giving the impression that you’re the most ignorant person imaginable in the hope that people will mistake you for an unwitting victim. Well that all sounds like an awful lot of work to me.

In light of my general disgust with the practice of blamestorming, rather than teach you folk how to do it, I’m going to teach you how to dodge it.

So, let’s imagine that you and a few other likely suspects are sitting in the boss’s office, he’s been babbling on for five minutes about honour and values and how the leather lounges in the officers mess shouldn’t be used in a bobsled race.

Then, out of the corner of your eye, you notice a change in the demeanour of one of your co-conspirators. His eyes start darting about the room, he starts fidgeting, squirming in his seat, and you know that any second now he’s going to blurt out your name and twist the story around so it sounds like everything’s your fault (and let’s face it, there wouldn’t be much twisting involved). Now, I know what you’re thinking, but it won’t work – simply diving out the window is only a temporary solution to this problem.

What you need is sympathy and plenty of it. Open your excuses book and look under “L” for “leather lounge bobsled race”. If you’ve planned ahead, you’ll have something prepared and ready to go. You need to give the boss a reason to feel sorry for you, or at least think you’ve completely lost your mind and there’s no way you can be held accountable for your actions.

Once you have everyone convinced that the little people who live in your sock draw offer a legitimate alibi, it’s up to you whether you want to dump your potentially back-stabbing mate in it this time, or hold it over his head for future gain.