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Having not bought any companies for nine months, our chief executive John Gatz Jr was in a restless mood. So after last week鈥檚 news that Laing O鈥橰ourke had sacked 12 of its staff for forwarding an offensive email, he sprang into action, cracking down on Newt鈥檚 personal internet use.

鈥淭his monitoring software is really neat,鈥� John Jr said to me, as he scanned the instruction manual of the SpionStaff 4.7 Executive Suite. 鈥淚ts language filter and privacy settings have been personally approved by the leaders of seven different religious faiths! The Pope described it as: 鈥�2011鈥檚 must-have office management tool鈥�. No longer will the rogue element who abuse our precious bandwidth for so-called 鈥檈ntertainment鈥� be able to pollute the system for the rest of us honest, hardworking folk who use it solely for its intended purpose: to present corporate information and transmit it efficiently between associates 鈥︹��

Personally, I didn鈥檛 have a problem with this. I鈥檝e always had a sneaking suspicion that the global economic meltdown might very well have been avoided if the office workers of the Western world hadn鈥檛 spent most of 2007 updating their Facebook statuses. As he was talking, I was wistfully imagining a world where the language filter was set so ferociously high that I could get away with turning off my work email altogether (something I experimented with, to a certain amount of board-level disapproval, for three months in early 2009).

Two hours later my colleague Alan Quimby staggered over to my desk, wearing the suicidally irritated look of a man who has just done nine rounds with a corporate IT policy. 鈥淭his email filter is insane!鈥� he spluttered. 鈥淎pparently, I鈥檓 not allowed to say B***. Or B*. Or even B***-****! How am I meant to make architects understand what it is they鈥檙e supposed to be doing?鈥�

Perhaps he had a point. Swearing is something of a lingua franca in construction. And architects in particular need to be treated in a brutal and direct manner, or they鈥檒l start talking about 鈥渢ypology鈥� and wander off to do crayon pictures of space stations.

But I had a solution. Last year, as part of my ongoing anger management therapy, I underwent a course of intensive speech therapy. (So regularly had I begun to utter expletives under my breath relating to certain local architects that it was diagnosed as a verbal tic.) I was fortunate enough to be treated by a truly inspirational man. He was an Australian, not actually a trained doctor, but a failed actor, out of work since his character was bitten to death by a wombat outside Harold Bishop鈥檚 coffee shop. He prescribed what he called the 鈥淩everse King George鈥�, not quite as unpleasant a procedure as it sounds. It was simple: every time I was about to swear, all I had to do was start stammering.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be a terrible idea, so we tried something else: training my brain to replace all bad language with words that sounded similar but were less likely to cause offence. Blubby. Fumbling. Pollacks. Hull. That sort of thing.

It seemed to me that a similar approach could solve Alan鈥檚 problems with the language filter. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 brilliant!鈥� he exclaimed, after I had outlined the general concept. 鈥淚鈥檒l go and email the blubby architect about those fumbling costs right away.鈥�

Twenty minutes later, Alan was back, his head shaking in enraged bewilderment. 鈥淚t鈥檚 impossible!鈥� he wailed. 鈥淚t still bounced back! So I tried again, and again, and by then I was using language that would make Mary Poppins proud and that bounced back too! I鈥檓 going to have to blubby well send this data to Scunthorpe by post.鈥�
鈥淎h. I think I see the problem Alan 鈥︹��

As told to Nick Jones