It’s a good job that I didn’t write in January about Hewlett-Packard’s boardroom shenanigans, because their hired investigators may have considered hacking into my phone records just as they did the journalists at News.com, BusinessWeek, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Had they done so, I would have had no hesitation in unleashing my cat, Stanley, who weighs in at 6.5kg and would have no qualms about sitting on and hence suffocating HP’s investigators (yes, 6.5kg is considered obese in a cat, but tell that to Stanley, when a well-meaning but ultimately silly old codger down my street insists on leaving bowls of dog food outside our house every night in order to keep the bellies of a skulk of urban foxes replete).
If that failed, I could allow my other feline weapon, Sydney, to slowly — but undoubtedly with relish — dismember HP’s investigators. Sydney is a sleek, black-as-soot animal that we took in as a kitten in a moment of weakness when she turned up mewling on our windowsill. Little did we know then that she would grow into a lovable but ultimately dangerous cat whose only philosophy is that if it moves, it is edible.
Joking aside, HP’s investigators’ tactics were unacceptable, and HP should have monitored their tactics more closely. Apple was the last company to stoop so low when it filed lawsuits against a number of media outlets that it accused of divulging trade secrets about forthcoming products, when it was clearly someone inside Apple feeding news to those reporters. Have these companies never heard the phrase ‘don’t shoot the messenger’? Clearly not.
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