NatWest Death Toll Rises

Warning: contains scenes of heartbreaking inconvenience

Experts warn there is no cure in sight for the ongoing tragedy of NatWest customers dying needlessly in droves from the minor nuisance of having to use their credit card instead of their debit card.

Cash machines weren't built to handle this much customer dissatisfaction

The disaster began to unfold this morning, when a software glitch caused fatal bother and terminal vexation to 12 million innocent NatWest victims by freezing their current accounts.

By 10am, customer aid workers at NatWest branches were already overwhelmed by queues of pathetic refugees pouring out of clothes shops - many of them pitifully reduced to begging for compensation for the unbearable pain of being told “Your payment was not authorised. Please contact your card supplier” by a numeric keypad.

“My salary didn’t go through, which means that NatWest have effectively reduced me to slavery,” whined one haggard casualty, who had to drag her injured pride all the way up the high street from H&M. “My Visa card had already been thrashed black and blue. Without the essential new dress I need to go out in tonight, I know I will just die.”

“God in heaven help me, I don’t have any money to get pissed with either,” she moaned, before fainting through lack of ready funds.

“I was so moved by radio reports of the NatWest victims’ terrible plight, I ran ten miles to the nearest town in order to transfer a week’s wages (16,000 shillings, or £6.21) to Britain. I hope this will help to relieve their unimaginable suffering,” said Hassan, a subsistence farmer in Somaliland. Tragically, however, his potentially face-saving donation has also not gone through yet.

Modern Coventry Strangely Unfamiliar With Aircraft, Bombs And Ground Tremors

Not an earthquake

The inhabitants of Coventry are to be asked exactly why they think their city is a concrete shithole before being sat down for a little chat with their grandparents, after flooding Twitter yesterday with unprecedented ignorance of their own past when an RAF jet went supersonic.

“You might think that, having become a byword for indiscriminate death and destruction raining down from the skies, Coventry might know at least some of the key characteristics of bombs, tremors and aeroplanes,” sighed a Ministry of Defence spokesman. “For the benefit of the internet generation, let me recap. The telltale sign of an earthquake is things falling over, not a loud bang. If things fall over and there’s a loud bang, it could be a bomb. If there’s a loud bang but nothing falls over, well, that would be one of our planes doing Mach 1.”

“We do try not to do it too often,” he apologised, “Because you’re idiots.”

British Animal Lovers Now Welling Up For Panda That Doesn’t Exist

Millions of mawkish fauna addicts are flocking to Edinburgh Zoo tonight to hold a teary candle-lit vigil for a poor hypothetical panda cub, which has cruelly been denied its very existence through the tragic reluctance of its potential parents to give a shit.

This could have been a panda. But it isn't. And now it never will be

“I’m afraid there is now very little hope that this cute widdle baby panda will ever come into being,” sobbed a red-eyed Sir David Attenborough, after the zoo’s valiant attempts to draw male panda Gang Buang’s attention to his potential mate Tin Can’s erogenous zones met with tragic failure when it was discovered that pandas appear to lack any form of erogenous zones.

“We built a ‘love tunnel’ shaped like an enormous fuzzy Aunt Jemima from his enclosure to hers,” wept head keeper John Morris, “But all the dozy bugger does is sit there, obstinately reading intellectual journals, deconstructing the zeitgeist and dreaming up new theories about dark matter. Now she’s got a major strop on and she’s started writing a feminist blog for the Guardian.”

Devastated zoo managers expressed the hope that every heartbroken animal worshipper will buy a cuddly symbolic memento from its gift shop, take it home and lovingly bury it in a sunny corner of their garden to honour the memory of the panda baby which, tragically, never had a chance to live.

Meanwhile - unnoticed on the unimportant parts of the planet such as Mali, Somalia, Greece, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Russia, Texas and California - members of a common species of ape continue to die violently, as nature intended.

James Cameron Snaps Up Costa Concordia Movie Rights

Tragically, the menu featured quite a lot of pasta

Leading Hollywood director James Cameron has already made a preliminary swim around the wreck of the ill-fated Costa Concordia cruise liner, trying to picture in his mind’s eye the most dramatic way to frame doomed passengers tumbling down the sides of the awful monument to man’s hubris, after buying up the exclusive film rights to the terrible maritime disaster.

The cinematic visionary has already filmed Kate Winslet standing like a living figurehead at the prow of the enormous vessel, and is currently tying weights to Leonardo diCaprio.

“I’d like to thank the passengers who have died or are still missing for inspiring me to make a stack of bucks out of their unimaginable suffering,” he told admiring reporters, as he ordered Mexico to build him a full-sized replica of the floating behemoth as it would have appeared in its heyday, i.e. Thursday evening.

Northern Motorists Pledge Further Attempts To Outdo Soft Southern Shites

And he's into the chicane!

Disappointed at their failure to notch a single fatality in their M6-based effort, northerners today vowed to keep hurtling blindly into fog until they reassert their natural superiority over the soft southerners who piled into each other on the M5 near Taunton on Friday evening, killing seven and injuring 51 in a collision involving 34 vehicles.

“A’ve reet got me fog lights on aye, so a’ can drive at any speed a’ fookin’ please,” professional northerner Mark Whippet shouted into his mobile phone as he enthusiastically flung his white Transit van through a contraflow system on the M1 north of Leeds at 70mph.

Meanwhile, rather than upsetting victims’ relatives by suggesting that even mild-mannered old ladies are instantly transformed into reckless banzai-screaming lunatics the moment they start an engine, Avon and Somerset police are now investigating a theory that impenetrable walls of dense black smoke from rockets may have drifted onto the M5 from a nearby fireworks display - possibly involving V2 missiles left over from the war.

Tech Manufacturers Braced For Unimaginable Suffering

A disaster of unimaginable proportions is engulfing many of the world’s leading technology brands, as Thailand inexorably disappears under raging floodwaters.

Oh, the humanity

A distraught Sony is already weeping inconsolably over the tragic loss of its baby NEX-7 and Reflex Alpha 65 cameras, while Western Digital, Toshiba and Seagate watched helplessly as this year’s desperately-needed crop of hard drives was washed away by the raging torrents.

“Whenever natural disasters strike in South East Asia, it’s always the poor businessman who bears the brunt of the human cost,” said a spokesman for the Disasters Emergency Committee, which is launching a major fundraising appeal. “Millions of suffering salarymen’s miserable lives have already been blighted by the Japanese earthquake earlier this year - and now this devastating flood threatens to wipe out their meagre Q3 profits as well.”

“A £2 donation will buy a snorkel tube and facemask - each one enabling a brown worker in Thailand to go back to work, albeit with deductions for leaving the production line to come up for air every three minutes,” he explained, “While every £200 we raise will provide him with a desperately-needed aqualung, enabling him to stay down in the factory almost without interruption.”

“Please, please, make a difference,” he implored. “With your generous help, poor Sony could return to profit one day.”

Hurricane Irene Vanishes Off Map As Swiftly As It Appeared

The devastating hurricane which has left the entire eastern seaboard of the United States submerged under thirty fathoms of water has suddenly ceased to exist, having now crossed into the fictional realm of Canada.

Hurricane Irene’s abrupt disappearance from the face of the earth is as rapid as its mysterious appearance out of nowhere - or the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, as they are also known to a handful of cartographers.

Vermont

As a pitiable handful of American survivors doggedly dived down to their sunken cities, searching desperately for a hardware store with portable generators in stock, the people of Haiti – which is still largely in ruins three years after being blasted by four hurricanes of such force that they made global headlines, even though they only devastated a third-world backwater whose people are only black – generously dug deep in their pockets to send emergency supplies of chilled Budweiser to the underwater state of Vermont.

“My heart goes out to the suffering white folks on America’s east coast,” said mango farmer Jean-Baptiste Veilleux, who is still searching for the remains of his family. “I am glad to donate a month’s income to alleviate their unimaginable suffering. I only hope that $30 will be enough to satisfy an American family’s urgent need for refreshing, ice-cold beers.”

You Wogs Have A Damned Funny Sense Of Priorities, Moans Hague

Tripoli, as it appears to Mr Hague

Foreign secretary William Hague has given Libyan rebel leaders a piece of his mind today, after they obtusely decided that averting a humanitarian disaster among their own people was in some way more important than dragging a comatose cancer victim off his deathbed to spend his last dying days lying unconscious in a Scottish prison.

“No, no, no, you stupid bloody wogs, we don’t want to see pictures of him! We want him in person, dead or alive!” Mr Hague yelled down the phone at the National Transition Council. “Look, if you’re too bone idle to go and fetch the bugger yourselves, just tell us which mud hut he’s hiding in and we’ll send big metal birds over to drop fire eggs on his house, damn you.”

Mr Hague also vented his righteous fury over the ungrateful rebels’ bloody-minded refusal to put the restoration of essential services to Tripoli on hold and to stop searching for 50,000 missing citizens, and urged them to get cracking instead on the more pressing business of handing over a miscreant who, he insists, he has it on good authority - i.e. from a wily old gentleman with his ear to the grapevine - could quite possibly have shot WPC Yvonne Fletcher from inside the Libyan embassy in London 27 years ago.

“Oh, for God’s sake just drop whatever time-wasting arab nonsense you’re up to, you silly camel-fancying layabouts, and just do as you’re bloody told or you'll get my boot up your backsides,” he shouted. “Surely even your dozy eyetie masters taught you to respect white man’s justice?”

“And before you ask: no, I won’t trade either of them for my sister,” he snapped angrily.

0.01mm Tsunami Reaches Sussex Coast

The terrifying horizontal wall of water facing Brighton

Millions of potential tsunami victims across the south-east are speaking of little else but their miraculous deliverance from almost certain death today, after an earthquake with a magnitude of almost 4 threatened to hurl the entire English Channel inland at 7.59 this morning.

“When my teacup momentarily rattled in its saucer, all that awful footage from Japan flashed before my eyes,” gasped white-faced futures trader Rob Blind, who was waiting for the 0803 from Haywards Heath. “But that was caused by the 0716 from London Bridge rattling in. Thirty seconds later, though, there was a brief ripple in my tea and I found out when I got to work that it can only have been caused by the most devastating earthquake to hit the south coast since 1734.”

“That’s the year 1734, by the way,” he added earnestly. “I don’t mean the train I caught home from work yesterday, although that was a fucking disaster in its own right.”

All over the south-east, emergency services reported the same appalling news - an enormous wall of water was not crawling relentlessly towards a defenceless London, tall buildings were providentially left standing and millions had somehow escaped a terrible death by drowning.

On hearing the dreadful news, the homeless thousands of Japan’s Fukushima province swiftly organised a collection for their fellow survivors on the other side of the globe. The first package of aid - a pair of threadbare Speedos and an old snorkel - is expected to arrive in the post on Monday.

Belfast Celebrates Worst Bit Of Shipbuilding In History

Go off an' drown some English, y'dorty great bastard now

Ulster today celebrated the centenary of the shoddiest attempt at building a ship the world has ever seen, marking the ill-fated launch of the doomed Titanic from the forever-tainted Harland and Woolf shipyard with cheering and blaring boat hooters. The city also unveiled a tragic exhibition of personal effects formerly owned by those condemned to drown in the icy waters of the Atlantic by the appalling example of Irish craftsmanship at its worst.

The party kicked off with a religious ceremony as a priest pointed out that, if Noah had been Irish, then the world would be pretty damned quiet nowadays. The crowds then held a moment’s silence in respect for the 1,517 passengers and crew they killed with their hideously unseaworthy vessel, followed by 62 raucous seconds of cheerfully inappropriate self-congratulation as they imagined their monstrous death tub creaking down the slipway into the dark waters that would swallow it within the space of a year.

“For too long Belfast’s role in the Titanic story has been neglected,” said Niall O Donnghaile, the city’s lord mayor. “But attitudes have changed since those far-off days, and generations have now grown up in this city feeling that being associated with pointless and entirely avoidable slaughter is nothing to be particularly ashamed of.”

“Look, how the fuck else are we going to persuade foreigners to visit Belfast?” said a spokesman for Tourism Ireland. “It was either this or The Authentic IRA Fun Palace.”

French Investigators Still Not Sure Why French Airliner Crashed

Air Crash Bodies Say France Definitely Not Responsible For Their Deaths

France has announced that its search team has found bodies in a section of the Air France airliner that crashed in mid-Atlantic in 2009, adding that several of them clearly died clutching hastily-written notes to the windows that absolutely exonerate France from any blame for their untimely demise.

Of course, the wreckage could be an elaborate hoax

“I regret zat our magnificent search ‘as not located ze black boxes of Flight 447, which ‘ave undoubtedly been eaten by ze fabulous squid énorme,” said environment minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet. “In zair absence, ‘owever, ze testimony of zose aboard ze doomed Airbus must count vair ‘ighly in ze apportionment of ze blame.”

“One bloated corpse can be seen ‘olding ze serviette to ze window, bearing ze message: ‘Eef by some miracle I get out of zees alive, I would ‘appily fly Air France again wizout ‘esitation’,” she quoted. “Anozzer spent ze final moments of ‘er earthly existence writing ‘Typical - ze shitty British-manufactured wings ‘ave bose fallen off, isn’t it’.”

“I do not wish to pre-empt ze official Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses report into ze causes of ze crash,” the minister went on confidently, “But, as ever, eet ees patently obvious zat any so-called failings in French aircraft design, manufacture and operation exist solely in ze fevered imaginations of ze evil Anglo-Saxon accident investigation experts.”

“Zut,” she added for no apparent reason.

Forget Wars, Disasters And The Recession - It’s The Hobbit!

Britain cast off its worries today and - for a brief, poignant moment of self-delusion - forgot that it was enmeshed in yet another war with no strategic goals, with its economy in ruins and facing worse to come in a widely-dreaded budget, while on the other side of the world Japanese engineers were risking their lives to prevent a nuclear meltdown.

Thank God you're here, Peter Jackson

“Look, everyone, we’re filming The Hobbit!” announced inflatable New Zealand director Peter Jackson as he finally got round to pointing a camera at some actors.

“Who else but the foremost multi-Oscar-winning director, producer, scriptwriter, production designer, sound editor, key grip, costume designer, model-maker, focus puller, armourer, CGI artiste, stunt pilot, cameo extra, fluffer and visionary the world has ever seen could have emerged still breathing and sane from the terrible, terrible disasters we’ve faced in the last couple of years?” he shouted modestly.

“First we had a bit of a legal kerfuffle with a Mr. Tolkien’s estate, who seemed to think they owned the rights to my gloriously-imagined vision," boasted the world's most down-to-earth mogul. "Then MGM’s little cashflow blip left dear little Guillermo del Toro in tears, so I had to step in. After that, would you believe the actors actually wanted paying for the privilege of appearing in the greatest story ever told? To top it all, right at the very last minute poor old yours truly had an unscheduled spot of bother with the old guts! I hadn’t seen such a stinking torrent of shit since Meet The Feebles! But hello world! Here I am again!”

“These industrial estates are like rabbit warrens,” he mused aloud to the solitary freelance reporter who turned up at his studio to cover the most momentous day in the history of cinema for local free paper, the Wellingtonian. “I daresay all the world’s top journos must have got lost trying to find us.”

Meanwhile, war movie aficionados were delighted to hear that Jackson protégé Christian Rivers has just filmed his 1,000th frame of the long-awaited Dambusters remake.

Editors’ Tears Of Joy As British Casualties Emerge From Wreckage Of NZ Quake Story

The Newsnight production team in full-on tragedy mode

Just when all hope seemed lost, the New Zealand earthquake story coughed back to life today with the news that two Britons were among the dead.

Tears flowed as joyful journalists and news editors hugged each other and danced around their desks - whilst in Christchurch itself, reporters were all smiles as they booked themselves back into the hotels they had just left to catch the next flight home.

“Realistically, there was little hope of this story clinging to life after this length of time,” said one, as he asked the hotel barman for a receipt. “There’s only so much mileage you can get out of saying how New Zealand is so like England, because at the end of the day it plainly isn’t. The streets are clean, the buildings aren’t ugly, people have decent jobs and a high standard of living and everyone’s happy. To the British people, it’s just another foreign country full of foreign people who happen to speak English.”

“Now, however, everything has changed,” he said, knocking back a double Scotch and asking for a refill. “With two Britons confirmed dead and more missing, this has now become a national tragedy for the folks back home. Hic.”

A BBC spokesman at Television Centre confirmed the happy news that the story was indeed alive and well.

“In fact, it’s on its legs and running about already,” he beamed. “For a while there it was touch and go, and I thought we were going to have to embark on a period of mourning and wailing, full of sob stories about the tragic state of the economy, job losses and service cuts. But this makes us stop and realise just how precious a gift death is.”

A Downing Street spokesman said that the government, too, was overjoyed at the miraculous revival of the story, and urged the British public to keep its eyes firmly fixed on the other side of the world.

Defence Secretary Declares War On Sun

Whilst delivering a keynote speech in an international conference on the vulnerability of electricity grids to hostile attack and natural disasters, Britain’s swivel-eyed secretary of state for defence, Dr Liam Fox, today seized the opportunity to call for a pan-global alliance to launch an all-out pre-emptive nuclear strike on the sun.

Dr Fox has been out in the sun for some considerable time now

“Make no mistake,” he warned delegates, adjusting his tinfoil hat to deflect deadly UV radiation from his mortal enemy, “According to NASA, in the year 2013 - or possibly earlier – a massive peak in the sun’s magnetic energy cycle and sunspot activity might very well create a solar storm of unprecedented ferocity. The inevitable worldwide geomagnetic storm this would unleash upon a defenceless Earth would undoubtedly knock out electricity grids for hours, days, weeks, months or most likely forever - bringing civilisation as we know it to a crashing halt and hurling the handful of terrified survivors back to the stone age, only to be mercilessly hunted down and eaten by irradiated mutant dinosaurs as tall as skyscrapers.”

“The only way that the people of Earth can save themselves from catastrophe is to lay aside their petty squabbles and unite to launch the world’s entire stock of thermonuclear warheads at our terrible enemy, the sun,” he shrieked, producing a battered Walkman cassette player from his pocket and jabbing at the play button until the batteries fell out. “As I know this idea will sound altogether too fantastic to the narrow minds of disbelievers, I have just set the process in motion by launching Britain’s entire stock of Trident missiles into space. Now you have no choice but to follow suit, or the sun’s vengeful wrath will surely kill us all by teatime!”

“The self-destruct codes have been disabled by my trusty cyber-pet, Aibo,” he bellowed, as his white-coated attendants manhandled him back to the padded ambulance he arrived in, adding, “One day – mark my words – I, Dr Magnafox, will be revered as the visionary saviour of the human race. Incidentally, I have blueprints hidden in a secret compartment in my underpants for a gigantic golden statue of myself which will be visible from space, if a grateful human race wishes to honour me after the hour of destiny has safely passed.”

People Of Pakistan Deeply Moved By British Flood Danger

This harrowing sight brings tears to the eyes of millions in Pakistan

Big-hearted Pakistanis are delving deep into their waterlogged pockets to donate funds to alleviate the terrible flash floods which are expected to devastate Britain tonight, according to charity relief workers.

“When an impoverished, backward nation like Great Britain is hit by a natural disaster of such awful magnitude, my heart goes out to the poor, simple people who invariably lose what little they have,” said tribal elder Muhammed Fadil Jarwar, treading water above his submerged house. “I’m sure my wife Husna would be the first to agree, if she wasn’t floating face-down somewhere downstream at the moment.”

“Sadly, most people dismiss Britain as nothing more than a fertile breeding ground for terrorists, run by an autocratic government which happily spends billions on nuclear weapons yet cares nothing for the terrible plight of ordinary people,” commented a missing farmer’s wife, Salwa Badini, from the top of a tree. “But I always think of the suffering peasants who scrape out a meagre living in remote rural villages which nobody has ever heard of, like Harbertonford, watching helplessly as their livelihoods are swept away by a raging torrent of muddy floodwater.”

“I shall be taking a deep breath and diving down to my home, to look for a rupee or two to send to the needy people of Britain in their time of need,” she promised. “While I’m there, I’ll see if I can find my children.”

Bangladeshis Deeply Moved By Heartbreaking Images of Flood-Hit Nashville

The amphibious people of Bangladesh have dug deep into their pockets to send aid to the white flood victims of Nashville, Tennessee, after seeing images of the terrible devastation on their waterproofed televisions yesterday.

"My heart is breaking to see such unbearable suffering," said fish-man Masud Alam. "Here in Bangladesh we have learned to seal our few electrical items into polythene bags, grout the wall socket and extract oxygen through our rudimentary gills, so life goes on when our rivers burst their banks every year and submerge the entire country. But white people should not have to endure such hardships. I am selling my children to Mr Haq's clothing factory to raise funds which I will send to the United States for the relief of those poor whites."

The good white folk of Nashville, however, have shunned the aid which is flowing in from the poverty-stricken Asian state.

"Ah doan wan' no furrin cash nosir," said angry washed-out supremacist Jim-Bob Presley. "If ah cain't find it on a map, ah ain't havin' no truck with it. So you folks from aways beyond Clarksville kin keep yore funny money, y'hear?"

Meanwhile, black residents of the waterlogged Southern city have expressed no such reservations over the source of any aid that might come their way, but say they are not holding their breath - at least not until the water reaches the ceiling, at any rate.

Tears Of Joy At Newsdesks As Haiti Earthquake's Missing British Angle Finally Located

The faraway Haitian earthquake suddenly became a matter of paramount importance today, as thousands of frantically-digging journalists finally succeeded in unearthing a story about a missing Briton amid the appalling mass of jumbled detritus about uninteresting foreign paupers.

Although the Red Cross estimates that 50,000 unimportant black people have died in the disaster, with millions injured, orphaned or made homeless, the full scale of the unimaginable human tragedy was brought home to the front pages by the discovery that UN worker Ann Barnes has not been seen since Tuesday.

On hearing the awful news, prime minister Gordon Brown immediately swung into action by urging the world to send urgently-needed troops and supplies that could be used to find the missing British passport holder.

Meanwhile, the UK newspaper industry is generously donating thousands of tons of newsprint over the all-important next few days, to ensure that the British angle on the story does not die.

Meanwhile, in the United States, a concerned public is anxiously waiting for Hollywood's leading actors to appear on TV asking it for donations.

Brown Strangely Unwilling To Slavishly Follow America For Once

Prime minister Gordon Brown has bravely shown that he is nobody's poodle, by steadfastly refusing to meekly fall in line with US government policy on punitive taxation of the banking sector and aid to earthquake-hit Haiti.

Mr Brown issued a deliberate snub to Washington today, by pointedly refusing to mirror President Obama's promise to Wall Street that it would be hit with punitive taxation until US citizens received back every last cent of the $430bn ploughed into the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Instead, the PM reiterated his warning that, if threatened with even a penny in the pound in additional taxation, the money-men would up sticks, shake the dust of the City of London from their feet and take their invaluable expertise with them to some rival financial centre such as Wall Street.

Meanwhile, as the US president swiftly pledged $100m in immediate aid to the flattened Caribbean nation of Haiti - along with the instant deployment of 5,000 troops plus ships, helicopters, planes and a floating hospital to help with rescue efforts - Mr Brown fearlessly demonstrated his new-found independence from Washington by pulling a paltry £6m in loose change out of his back pocket, chucking it in a charity collecting tin and asking the British people to spare a few coppers too.

Big-Hearted Celebrities Alert World To Unreported Earthquake Disaster

The scale of the devastation left by the huge earthquake that flattened much of Haiti yesterday is now becoming clear, thanks to the selfless tweeting of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Ben Stiller and that one out of Coldplay.

"many ppl just dont relise just how like HARROWING it can be for a schol full of cute little black children to get a ceiling on their heads!!!!!!!" said Hilton after her heroic 30-second effort. "hopefully ive like changed all that lol"

Lohan - who appeared on British TV screens over Christmas in Herbie: Fully Loaded - stirred her army of Twats into action with this deeply moving appeal: "omg ive just relised none of those hiatons had stunt doubles!!! shit guys this is 4 REAL hic"

Meanwhile, the Coldplay man took valuable time out from overseeing the hollowing-out of Exmoor to make the perfect home studio to remind people that he was a really caring sort of feelgood kind of guy who had actually been to Haiti once to give Oxfam the kind of valuable publicity that only a respected celebrity singer-songwriter can provide.

"People there live in these really cool shacks," he told his concerned fans. "It's really ethnic, but unfortunately the structural integrity of their authentic shanty dwellings may have left something to be desired in the face of a scale 7.2 earthquake. Go on, pop a quid in a tin, you'll feel so much better. I know I did."

Dazed Haitian survivors took time out from scrabbling frantically through the wreckage of Port-au-Prince for their families' mangled remains to express their tears of gratitude at the unprecedented amount of OMGs they were receiving.