You’ve heard of people with chips on their shoulders – but I’ve got a chip in mine. Not the hot potato variety (see pages 30-31 for those); mine’s a microchip, the sort vets implant under the skin of pets to tag them. They’re encoded with information about an animal and its owner, so that if Fido or Tiddles wanders off and is discovered by a stranger, they can be returned to their human carer.

I found out about them when my mate Roo took his dog, Bootsy, to get one. I figured I was more likely to get lost than Bootsy, especially when tipsy,  so it’d be fun to get a chip. Roo was up for it too, as were my other friends AJ and Rich.

After a few half-arsed searches for microchip tags on eBay, Roo revealed he had a veterinary nurse friend who could buy boxes of 25 chips for us wholesale. We each armed ourselves with a chip costing around £5, then headed to Bournemouth to have them fitted by Sarge, owner of body mod shop Metal Fatigue.

The tags are slightly bigger than a grain of rice, and the technology inside them is protected by a coat of toughened glass. They come ready-inserted in 2.8 gauge needles, designed to be slotted into a piercing gun. Sarge considered removing the chips from the needles supplied, piercing us with a thinner 3.2 gauge tool, then pushing the tags into place as he would a subdermal implant – but he settled for the gun as it’s less invasive.

Vets implant chips in nine-week-old kittens, so I was damned if I was going to bitch about the pain – but it hurt! My chip was shot into my shoulder, AJ’s was fired into his neck, Roo’s into the base of his cock, and Rich’s into his chest.

“The chip’s beneath my first ever tattoo, of a device taking a ‘666’ reading from my heart,” says Rich. “I wanted it in my forehead until I saw how deep it’d have to go. The implantation procedure felt like a normal piercing, with a satisfying meaty sensation as the needle travelled into my fatty tissue. There was a disappointingly pitiful amount of blood and I’ve healed without a mark.”

Chip-reading scanners are easier to buy than the chips, because as well as being used by vets, they’re used by horse dealers to check knacker’s yard nags aren’t being passed off as thoroughbred fillies. If scanned, our tags will reveal a unique ID number: mine’s 985 121 018 131 542. When the digits are put into the database of animal-tracking company idENTICHIP, they show that I’m a Chihuahua called Princess Fifi Twinklepants III (a show name, for when I enter Crufts). My mother’s listed as my owner; she has four pet moggies so she needs a dog to guard her against becoming a crazy cat lady.

Roo’s listed as an Anti-Gravity Marsupial Funkmagnet named Laird Confroocius Thvaites, owned by himself, and Rich is a King Lykaon of Arkadia, a Duck-billed Shapeshifter Platypus belonging to Roo.

Rich has also signed up to a service called idENTICHIP Locate, which will put up ‘Lost’ posters of him and send alerts to local dog wardens and recovery centres if Roo reports him AWOL! “I plan on purposefully losing myself and instigating a game of manhunt, with a reward for my finder,” says Rich.

I’m not sure he’ll be able to escape outside the UK, as we’re waiting to see if our microchips will cause problems with full-body security scanners at airports. We may have to take scanners with us on plane journeys to prove we’re not implanted with internal bombs! If we can’t fly, when it comes to holidays I guess we’ve had our chips…

As well as getting a microchip to identify her as a Chihuahua, Bizarre writer Em likes ordering large portions of number 135 from Chopsticks near her home in Brighton, and over-using the words ‘win’, ‘fail’, and ‘epic’.