BT Spares Trauma of Redundancy By Inviting Staff To Starve

Ailing phone company BT is offering staff the opportunity to starve to death at home, rather than going to work and fucking things up even more.

"Twenty years ago, BT was modestly going about its business of making £97 a second by graciously allowing people to have a telephone line," sobbed the company's teenage chief executive, Ian Livingston. "Then one day, after a superb lunch at Les Quat' Saisons, the board of directors suddenly decided to sell off our mobile phone offshoot just when it was starting to turn a profit and pretend to be a networked software provider instead. Don't blame me for that, I was busy learning to use a potty at the time."

"BT studied leading players like EDS and Fujitsu, who were getting rich on lucrative government contracts by half-heartedly tweaking programs that patently didn't work and never would," he continued, "And we looked at our home-grown CSS database, which we abandoned for being utterly unfit for purpose after three miserable years, and thought, 'Hey, we can do that!' Unfortunately, something else it turned out we couldn't do was negotiate a contract. So, unlike the other companies involved in the NHS computer fiasco, we have to pay the government a penalty for every day we put back the completion date. It's not my fault - I was sulking at the time after being told to tidy my room."

"Unfortunately for our shareholders, in a fit of spectacularly ill-advised enthusiasm we agreed to pick up the other companies' indecipherable coding when they were finally kicked off the job," added Mr Livingston, "And the earth will be consumed by its dying sun long before the bloody program stops filling every data field with nines every time a doctor issues a prescription. I wasn't responsible for that decision either, actually. I was spending most of my working day in the executive washroom, after discovering the joys of playing with myself."

Staff are being invited to stay away from their jobs for a year on 25% of their pay, in the hope that the program will somehow become self-aware and remedy its own failings.

"I have absolutely no idea how that might happen," admitted Mr Livingston. "After all, I am the chief executive of British Telecom, and I didn't get where I am today by understanding things. But that shouldn't stop me from collecting my £850,000 salary, nor indeed my £680,000 performance bonus."