‘We received a letter written in crayon from one of the dullards that shops here, and we knew we could get some publicity out of it,’ explained Director of Idiot Management, Jeremy Faulds. ‘The letter was a bit damp and smeared with our own-brand custard substitute, but we eventually worked out it was cheese that he was rambling on about.’

News of the heart-warming decision to humour someone four holes short of an Emmental spread quickly across social networks. ‘My mate put a photo of this tatty, poorly-spelled press release on Facebook, and I had to share it,’ said Sally Westland, a computer user.

‘It’s always nice to see a faceless corporation exploiting someone vulnerable, just to shift a few more pallets of processed crap. Especially if by sticking it on my wall I can make people ‘Like’ me,’ claimed Westland. ‘Besides, it’s just a bit of light-hearted fun, it’s not as if they’re manipulating anyone,’ said the viral advertiser’s dream, who prefers Waitrose own-brand ‘I can’t believe it’s not Roquefort’.

Renaming products to bow to the whims of customers is nothing new. Tesco noticed a surge in demand after rebranding ‘Carcass dregs squashed into a ball, rolled in yellow bits and then sliced’ as ‘Wiltshire ham’, and powdered soup-flavoured drinks sell better if they include the name of a random vegetable in the title.

‘We’re more than happy to appear to bow to our customers’ demands, and then ruthlessly exploit them for profit,’ admitted Faulds. ‘Although we’ve had some legal issues, since we rebranded our canned hotdogs as ‘food’.’

According to the TUC’s figures 5.3 million workers regularly work an average of 7.2 hours of unpaid overtime a week. The Employers Association’s figures however show that over 10 million workers often spend up to 30 hours a week ‘Dicking about on the internet, checking Facebook on their phone, or just having a bit of a chat, while desperately trying to look busy’.

‘That’s before we even get started on the idiots who actually create work every time they decide they can be bothered to try and do something productive.’ explained spokesman Jeremy Tomlinson, ‘The average idiot in an office can create approximately 75 hours of work for other people, unpicking and correcting all of their cock-ups, during a standard 40 hour week.’

The report finds that around a third of the UK workforce abuse their employers’ trust, resulting in businesses forking out up to 7 billion hours’ pay for the pleasure of their company, and says this is a problem that desperately needs addressing.

‘These people may be hungover, having personal problems outside of work that stop them concentrating, or may just be work-shy gits.’ continued Mr Tomlinson, ‘There are a variety of factors that contribute to it, and employers need to be empathetic, understanding, and tolerant, without compromising the viability of their business. But something certainly needs to be done.’

‘Now, if you’ll excuse me I was just in the middle of a game of poker on Facebook.’

‘They were 294 of us on the train and they herded us into an ageing 38-seater coach,’ complained one passenger. ‘But no sooner had we set off than the coach stopped and the driver clocked off. Then an announcement came over the tannoy telling us that due to a lack of drivers, we’d have to continue our journey by tramp.’

East Midlands Trains eventually delivered a skip which attracted enough vagrants for the passengers to continue their journey, but most were far from satisfied with the arrangement.

‘I paid £165 to go from Glasgow to London by train,’ said businessman, Derek Hornbridge. ‘It should have taken me five hours. Instead I ended up being carried most of the way by a tramp, arrived two weeks late for my meeting and seem to have caught some sort of skin disease.’

Sarah Wendle lost one stone during her ordeal. ‘My economy tramp was bloody uncomfortable, and stopped at every Wetherspoons between Corby and Luton. The toffs in first class arrived a bit quicker – I think it’s because they got the tramps that weren’t lame. Plus of course they got unlimited supplies of Special Brew and a paper napkin over the tramp’s shoulders.’

East Midlands Trains have apologised to their customers for the disruption, but some have already made up their minds not to use the service again. ‘I try to travel by train when I can because it’s the greenest way to travel,’ said Sarah. ‘But then I ended up on some tatty old hobo that clearly hadn’t been serviced for ages. I think from now on I’ll just drive. If you ask me, his emissions were worse than my Micra.’

By waylandsmithy and Vertically Challenged Giant

According to Tony Miller, a London-based Creative Director who employs two emotional rapists to oversee his agency’s Christmas output, their use has now become standard practice within the industry. ‘Regular ‘creatives’ are fine at getting someone to buy more baked beans or consider the benefits of a rotating toothbrush,’ he says, ‘but when it comes to convincing low-income parents that crippling and unnecessary consumption is the only way to make their own children love them, well, that’s where these guys step in.’

He continued ‘it used to be that we could just put whatever we were trying to flog next to baubles and walnuts and then film it, but in today’s economic climate, it’s just not enough. Mummy and daddy need to really feel how much of a disappointment they’ll be in the eyes of their nine-year-old daughter if, come Christmas morning, she doesn’t unwrap an Elmo with electronics in it and lots of tiny plastic sluts plus accessories.’

Kristian Baker, a fully qualified freelance emotional rapist from Shoreditch, says although Christmas is his busiest time of year, his services are always in high demand. ‘It’s not just Christmas, I’m busy all year round, advising my clients on the most effective way to really turn the emotional screws on their target market.’

‘I’ve worked with everyone; from advising Wonga.com on the use of cartoon imagery as a way of making sub-prime borrowing appear unthreatening, to helping Just For Men insinuate that the slightest visible onset of natural ageing will leave you divorced and unemployable. And it’s me who pioneered the use of sepia in debt-consolidation adverts. You’ll be seeing a lot of those in January’ he added.

He was also keen to dismiss any accusations that what he does for a living could be construed as deeply immoral. ‘I’m just a normal guy, and I know exactly what families go through at Christmas. In fact, I’ve got a wife and two kids myself… although they’re strictly for research purposes.’

Forced by bosses into cutting the presentation down to 20 slides for the annual global meeting, Cavaillier was so dissatisfied with the slimmed-down final product that he chose to remove his name from the cover slide and credit the work to ‘Alan Smithee’, a fictional pseudonym often used by middle-management sales specialists who feel that their artistic control of a slide-show has been compromised.

“The narrative became so linear that the audience did not have time to question the true meaning of market segmentation and tailored sales promotion, removing all depth from the story of our new product release,” complained the creator, exhaling smoke from his Marlboro Light outside the Basingstoke business unit where the sales meeting was held. “It was a travesty of what I wanted to say.”

But it is not just the unnerving competitor analysis and truthfully stark customer lead-time expectation slides that have been restored in this full-length exploration of a man at odds with his sales targets. Cavaillier’s ‘2012_EMEA_Sales_Forecast.ppt (version intégrale)’ also features cutting edge animated fade-ins, and an alternative ending, a bleak, apocalyptic interpretation of Q3 and Q4 sales figures that he believes will haunt the audience long after they have returned to their hotel to check their e-mails.

“With the first release, I was basically forced to finish on a more commercially appealing ending, despite the reality that life seldom delivers on expectations and Chinese competitive pressure will continue to get stronger as our cost base remains high. That, more than anything, betrayed the essence of the project.”

Thankfully, though, fans of his Microsoft Office 2007 enabled work will get a chance to see the full breadth of his vision for next fiscal year’s budget at a special screening in meeting room 2A at 4pm Thursday, or as a pdf attachment if they can’t make that.

‘The people running this one have done brilliantly,’ said Christopher James of Kingham, Oxfordshire. ‘It’s a great central location, near Starbucks and Pizza Express, and there’s plenty of opportunities for a few sherbets in the evening. But all the organisers are hippies and unemployed, so they had some time on their hands, and that got me thinking – what if you wanted to start a protest but couldn’t fit the destruction of the entire bourgeois rentier system into your busy working schedule? You’d need an events manager – just like if you were planning to get married.’

ProtestEx offers to handle all aspects of creating a protest, from catering to communication to accommodation. ‘We can even sell you colour co-ordinated tents that spell out your aims when viewed from a BBC helicopter – I’ve got a source in Shanghai,’ said Mr James. ‘But I’m also looking to branch out into other causes. Fox hunting, anti-nuclear, anti-Murdoch – you name it, we’ll help you hate it. Obviously we can’t promise your protest will succeed, but we can guarantee you unlimited skinny macchiatos during the attempt. If things go well I’m hoping for a stock market flotation in 2015.’

‘What we want is to make sure your big day goes off without a hitch,’ he continued. ‘You can’t have just anyone turning up, so we’ve negotiated favourable security rates with G4. Can you imagine if gypos showed up on your campsite with their dogs, unruly children and big fat brides? Nightmare! The last thing you want when demonstrating to save the world is a bunch of selfish people only worried about their own needs. We’ll stop them for you – for a fee.’

‘There’s no doubt it’s gone to his head,’ said BBC Director General, Mark Thompson. ‘Inflation of Robert’s ego is running at an all-time high and rising interest rates among viewers only seem to be making the problem worse. We’ve tried to get him doing some positive stories about economic growth, but he thinks he’s the poster boy of economic Armageddon. This morning he even reported from outside the Bank of England wearing a sandwich board saying ‘The end is nigh’.’

Those closest to Peston say the problem started when he received widespread plaudits for uncovering the near collapse and subsequent nationalisation of Northern Rock in 2008. ‘Overnight he became unbearable,’ said his wife. ‘He would sit at home watching the lines of people queuing outside banks with a look of fear in their eyes. All he could say was ‘I did that’, over and over again, a smirk spreading across his face.’

‘It didn’t seem to be a problem at first,’ said Helen Boaden, Director of News at the BBC. ‘Although we knew he was becoming a smug git, we didn’t receive many complaints. I think people were still mesmerized by his strange delivery style and probably didn’t understand a word he was saying. But when he was the first person to report on the Lloyds TSB-HBOS merger, the cameraman actually had to zoom out to keep his ever-increasing grin in the shot.’

Analysts are now claiming that the continual presence of Peston’s self-satisfied face on BBC news programming could itself be exacerbating slumps in the market and the ongoing Eurozone crisis. ‘We are urging the BBC to adopt a policy of quantitative easing and pump more business and economics correspondents into their news coverage in order to shore up viewers’ unhealthy exposure to Robert Peston.’

But Peston’s friends are becoming increasingly concerned about his mental health. ‘Robert’s continuous wallowing in bad news is a worry. He has developed an unhealthy phobia of green ‘up’ arrows. It’s not a problem in the studio, but he’s an emotional wreck at traffic lights.’

Perks (hat-tip to waylandsmithy)

The protestors are said to be ‘in disarray’ over news of Mr Monbiot’s imminent arrival at the camp. The visit is supposedly to offer ‘advice on fully ethical and sustainable modes of inner city non-violent passive resistance’, but it is widely seen by the tented ones as the quickest way to bore them into giving up any hope of changing the world and going home instead for a nice, hot, gas-powered bath.

The City of London Corporation’s planning committee says that they have ‘thought long and hard’ before calling in Mr Monbiot, a move which County Hall refers to as the ‘nuclear option’ – although, they clarified, ‘obviously, without the nuclear’.

Monbiot (48) is believed to have already begun the walk to London from his wattle-and-daub eco-home in the Brecon Beacons. He plans to travel as far as Pangbourne on foot, completing the journey down the Thames in a geodesic kayak, finally riding into St Paul’s square on a solar powered Segway.

‘Don’t get me wrong: George is, like, my hero,’ explained protester Jeremy ‘Jezza’ Compton-Couvela sitting on the steps of St Paul’s, shivering, and drenched in global warming-related rain. ‘But as soon as he turned up at Dale Farm he started checking whether I had lithium ion batteries in my torch, which I thought was just a bit too ‘investigative’. I let it go, I went along with it, but by the time he left, I was sharing my tent with a homeless family from Dagenham and cooking them a hearty vegan breakfast every morning. I really can’t go through all that again.’

The staff and clergy of Saint Paul’s are already resigning en masse in protest at the plan.

‘I realise it’s a fairly desperate measure’ admitted City of London Corporation’s policy and resources committee chairman, Stuart Fraser. ‘But the only workable alternative was to send in Vanessa Redgrave. I know this is the City of London, but we do have some ethics.’