Actor Kris, also known as ‘him off My Family’ has decided to postpone filming his marriage to ‘that MILF off the BT advert’ after a boozy night planning his stag weekend ended sourly with his best man telling him ‘don’t do it’. ‘I started reconsidering what I was doing just the other day after that little shit Lucy spilled the beans to her dad,’ he said. ‘She even invited him to the bloody wedding. There’s no way I’m getting married with that tosser and his ‘secretary’ criticising everything.’

‘Me and the guys have had some really deep chats after a few pints recently and it’s made me realise that Jane is probably a whole heap of trouble,’ said Kris. ‘Quite apart from the clearly rocky foundations to our relationship, my mates have pointed out to me that she’s already dumped some handsome, well-off bloke who clearly dotes on his daughter, just for being a bit of a workaholic.’

‘I can be a bit of a geek when it comes to broadband internet access – like the time I moved the microwave oven to a different mains socket and disconnected the entire extension wiring of the house to get a little bit of extra speed,’ explained Kris. ‘My best man Clive told me I can be a ‘boring knob’ and that Esther will probably just dump me in favour of a nice interesting CSA agreement once she’s used me as a live-in sperm donor.’

‘I just don’t know what to to,’ said the disheartened actor, ‘because she’s a really good shag, but I not sure if I can go through with a wedding just for the famous benefit of ‘guaranteed sex’ that getting married always brings. Pardon? They stop what? Conjugal? Oh my god…..get my agent on the phone! NOW!!!’

QorbeQ

After months of industry speculation, BT chairman Sir Michael Rake conceded that the company scrapped its phones because ‘everyone was being driven mad by people calling at all hours of the day and night to complain that their phones weren’t working or they were being overcharged or stuff like that’.

He said that the company’s initial response had been to put callers on hold for a time to let them think through the implications of what they were saying, but then operators would go back and find them still there, sometimes becoming very unpleasant.

He said, ‘We went to Ofcom for advice and they suggested going ex-directory which worked for a while, but then somehow someone got hold of the number and the whole nightmare started all over again.’

‘The pattern of calls was unrelenting,’ said Sir Michael. ’This wasn’t working, that wasn’t working - they just never gave up. The company’s morale was only rescued by a major investment in a new automated call handling system that saved us from going under completely – it gave us our lives back.’

‘From that day on, no-one at BT has been bothered by a single customer, and the website which we spent months ensuring answers nobody’s questions is a complete success. I am particularly pleased with the FAQ section, which goes well beyond the industry norm of 85% non-relevant questions.’

Sir Michael said that senior board members could still make phone calls using Skype. ‘Look, I can patch my broker and lawyer into this conversation by just pressing this button… Hmm, doesn’t seem to be working. Hello? Hello? Sounds like the line might be down. Oh shit, I hope they don’t use the BT exchange. How the hell am I going to get hold of an engineer?’

The course takes the troops out of their comfort zone of the battlefield, and throws them into the foreign world of an anonymous soulless office, and will be run by an elite team of middle managers drawn from the ranks of British Telecom, Thames Water and Surrey County Council. Expected to last five days, once the sensory deprivation of the modern office sinks in, the course will feel many, many times longer.

‘Our men are among the most highly trained in the world, but today’s battles require new skills,’ commented a senior SAS officer, ‘our early tests showed that you put an SAS man in the modern office kitchen and nine times out of ten he’ll try and make himself a brew in the booby-trapped personal mug belonging to the facilities service manager. Within hours he will be crippled by a backbreaking chair, and driven mad through the isolation of being posted to a windowless basement office that is somehow simultaneously far too hot, and really bloody cold. We’re in danger of becoming a laughing stock.’

Early results of the training were said to have had a positive effect on boosting the SAS’s office competency. On the final training exercise at the end of the first course, soldiers who just five days earlier had taken a compliment delivered at a packed team meeting at face value, had learnt to work together to ensure a common enemy’s work was constantly going missing from the printer, effectively neutralising their short-term influence. They then turned on each other, with the overall exercise winner successfully distributing his teammate’s CV on photocopiers near the most dangerous office gossips, before faking his expenses to pay for an afternoon session in the pub.

While the SAS attendees said they’d learnt a lot from the course that they could take back to help win their ongoing bloodthirsty battles with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Ministry of Defence, they readily accepted they weren’t cut out for the dangers of office life and may not be the kind of men you’d want next to you in the cubicles.

‘I can carry my own bodyweight in kit over hundreds of miles in unbearable heat, hide in barren sub-arctic wasteland surviving only on nutrients found in fox poo, and launch cold-blooded lethal force attacks on numerically superior enemy forces with a weapon crafted from a lolly stick,’ observed a veteran SAS lieutenant, ‘but the things these civil service office workers do every day just to get a slightly more executive grade stapler? It’s inhuman!’

Helena.handcart, with Ugi

Proceedings began with a displeased Rake dialling a premium rate number, at which point he was welcomed by the voice of an automated clerk and asked to state his name clearly after the tone.  Court records show that the defendant was heard to say, ‘Sir Michael Rake,’ which was immediately followed by an electronic beep, and then, after a pause, the words, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.  Sir Michael . . .’, before the clerk interjected and told the defendant, ‘We are sorry, we did not catch that.  Please try again or you will be placed on remand at Brixton Prison.’

After several laboured, phonetic enunciations of his name, an increasingly irritated Rake was informed by the clerk of the charges laid against him, before being given the options, ‘To plead guilty, press 1.  To plead not guilty, press 2′.  At discovering there was no option to query the prosecution’s charges, Sir Michael Rake looked around the courtroom in disbelief, before angrily asking the empty chamber, ‘Can’t I just speak to a human being?’  After a lengthy pause, the clerk responded, ‘You don’t appear to have selected an option.  To plead guilty, press 1.  To plead not guilty, press 2.’

Confronted only with silence for several minutes, a now visibly infuriated Sir Michael Rake was seen to pace the courtroom muttering profanities indecipherable to the automated clerk, before finally striking the phone’s numberpad with the handset in a fit of anger.  ‘You’ve chosen to plead guilty,’ the clerk announced, at which point an emotionally exhausted Rake broke down and delivered a detailed confession of his company’s crimes, all of which was recorded to help the court improve its service to future customers.

‘We are thrilled that the first fully-automated, unmanned trial has been such a success,’ said His Honour Justice Collins afterwards.  ‘And we’re delighted that it was the chairman of BT who was the first to test it out.  I’m sure he’ll be enormously grateful that our new efficient system has brought this painful ordeal to such a swift conclusion.’  Justice Collins sentenced Sir Michael Rake to 200 hours community service in the court service’s new Mumbai call centre.

A spokesman for BT said ‘There is a perception out there that there is little point in having a theme about a bloke who’s getting it on with a tasty older woman if all they do is send emails and extol the virtues of broadband telephones.  We take these complaints very seriously and viewers will soon get to see a bit of bedroom action.’  Consumer groups have welcomed the announcement, but are urging BT to act quickly before the couple get married.

Vandella

The tragic rift opened after the couple took the same morning off work to wait for a BT engineer to arrive.  The divide deepened after they both popped monentarly into the kitchen, leaving the front door unguarded. Tragically, the brief lapse allowed the visting BT professional to slip a ‘While You Were Out’ card through the door.

After half an hour of listening to music on hold, and a frustrating conversation with a call centre operator, passions were inflamed, and the tensions between the couple became insurmountable.

Vandella