NewsBiscuit

Private health practices using the latest surgical techniques have successfully carried out the first operation allowing the patients to permanently alter their social class. Building on decades of experience from surgeons who have changed people’s appeareance or even their gender, medical teams are now able to assist people who feel they were born into the wrong level of society.

After months of counselling, Reg Smith of East London decided to alter his identity; ‘Well, I’d always felt that I was born into the wrong class’ said Reg before his op. ‘Like, when we’d have our tea break on the building site I used to secretly drink lapsang souchong, and er, come Saturday, I’d tell the lads I was off to the greyhounds, whereas in fact I was dressing up in cravates and browsing through antique shops in Richmond.’ The procedure with Reg involved a twelve hour operation, with the surgeon removing the naked lady tattoo on the arm, sewing up the crack in the bottom, making the front teeth stick out and wrinkling up the nose into a permanent superior sneer. Reginald Smythe, as he will now be known affected not to know the interviewer after the operation, and instructed her to contact his staff if she wished to make an appointment to speak to him.

Another person considering a class-change operation was Patricia Dickens; ‘Well I always pretended I was working class, you know, wore jumpers with holes in the arms, lived in a squat in Hackney, that sort of thing. But it was only skin deep really – I mean my father was still Sir Gerald Dickens of Dickens & Jones’. Patricia later postponed a permanent change when she read the consent form explaining that she would have to live in a tower block with four kids and a rottweiler, and she wouldn’t be allowed to go home to Sussex at the weekends.

But critics say the procedure is unethical, and that in some cases the operation can go tragically wrong. After Reginald Smythe’s class change operation, friends say that they ‘don’t know whether he is a chav or a toff’. ‘He drinks decaffeinated cappuccino; but with five sugars’. Reg is stuck with a bizarre accent, which swings wildly between upper class and cockney, meaning that the only job open to him is becoming an alternative comedian. Mr Smythe has stated that he intends to pursue the class change scandal through the proper legal channels ‘and then smash their bloody face in.’

newsbiscuit

Posted: Jan 10th, 2008 by NewsBiscuit