Off With Stress.

I have often considered going OFF WITH STRESS. In the police, you have to meet certain conditions before you can successfully be signed OFF WITH STRESS. This may be the case for other jobs too, but I believe they especially apply in my arena due to the public scrutiny to which we are subject:

1. You must be from a minority: black, Asian, and/or female.
2. You must be totally unscrupulous, willing to use your family and friends as tools in your self-serving game.
3. You should have a good symbiotic relationship with your doctor, possibly involving money (although I would not like to speculate on this). Alternatively, you must have a lazy, incompetent doctor.
4. You should be a mediocre police officer at best, if not positively useless.

Assuming you satisfy all these condition, the first step is to allow your work ethic to slack. Your jobs should build up until you are being summoned to management meetings over them. You should breach at least one force policy in relation to timely enaction of investigations. You should begin to hear mutterings among your colleagues about what a drain you are on the team. The word “Regulation” followed by almost any number, should begin to feature in your vocabulary (these relate to Disciplinary procedures).

Then you strike. Just as you are about to be “stuck on” for any number of poor working practices, you suddenly fail to turn up for work. You make yourself unreachable for a week although physical visits to your home can be averted by a quick text to your supervisor reading “Off with stress”. He/she will immediately know what this means and will not dare to contact you lest he be accused of bullying/discrimination.

Now will follow months of shillyshallying. Your stack of jobs which have begun to rot and moulder in the bottom of your docket will be farmed out to your disgruntled colleagues. They will then have to deal with the complaints by the victims of these crimes and will be blamed for any subsequent failures to convict anyone. You may come back to work after a month or so, just to put in a few hours a day during which you moon around doing nothing in particular. The purpose of these few hours is merely to build up more jobs which you can then leave in a state of disarray, and also to show everyone how depressed you really are. Once that has been achieved, you can disappear for several months.

At last, just when everyone has almost forgotten your name and is fairly certain you have died, you announce that you have been accepted to the Met as a firearms officer.

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