Prairie Dogging

Prairie Dogging, in an office environment, occurs when there is a ruckus in a cube farm and everyone pops their head over their cubicle wall to see what is going on. It also happens when an office door opens or closes, meaning the boss is on the prowl. Cubicle dwellers need to know where the boss is so they can open a phony spreadsheet or some other cover on their computer so the boss does not know that you were actually blogging, looking up stuff on froogle, playing games, or otherwise goofing off. Not that I do any of these things of course. I refrain from blogging at work. Really - I do! They CAN track web usage you know. In the intrest of keeping the job I like, I use the web reasonably and within County guidelines. And all my spreadsheets are real.

But a while ago, during a day that called for a lot of prairie dogging, I came up with an excellent idea. I needed a PERISCOPE! Just like a submarine skipper. I needed a periscope that could swivel around, and allow me to see what was going on without having to stand up.

So, I checked on froogle and found just what I was looking for. The Office Espionage Kit: Everything You Need to Spy on Your Co-workers And Find Out What They're Saying About You, hardcover edition.

This wonderful book has all kinds of office spy tips, and the "kit" part means it also contains two mirrors and a spy listening device. You can use the mirrors to build your very own periscope, or you can go low tech and just hold the mirrors in your hand and use them to peek around corners.
There is also a very wide selection of pre-made periscopes, suitable for the office. These range from the WHIMSICAL, to CHILDRENS TOYS and HIGH END models complete with lighting and magnification, and some that you WOULD NEVER TAKE TO THE OFFICE - unless you work in a very liberal office (and even then you would probably want to keep it a secret).

But amazingly enough, NOBODY has come up with this idea - the office webcam on a stick! Think about it, This would be the ULTIMATE office periscope. All you need is a webcam, your office computer, and a stick. Thats it! Attach the webcam to the stick, plug it in, and you have an instant viewing device. You would use it to peek over cubical walls, around the corners of your cubicle door, over file cabinets, and such. The camera on a stick would also be able to attain viewing angles impossible with a periscope, unless you are very flexable.

If you get a webcam and microphone on a stick, you can have conversations with the person next door. If your boss asks you what you are doing, you can respond with "video-confrencing". Sounds very impressive and high tech, while in fact what you are actually doing is goofing off.

So while I wait for my espionage kit to arrive from the nice people at Amazon.com, I am going to get a webcam, a stick, some wire, duct tape, and some glue. The office computer will not allow me to install software, but someone got me a 1 gigabyte USB drive for christmas, on which I can put the webcam software and a recent version of Firefox web browser (the work computer has crappy IE version 5.0 with java, flash, and everything else turned off).

Ill keep updates of the results here. I might even patent my webcam on a stick idea and start a side business. Or then again, maybe not. Anyone can simply make one. We are not talking about something very complicated here - just a webcam and a stick.