Outlook better still be down on Monday fume office workers

'I was going to blame this outage for the fact I haven't done any work for most of the last 6 months.' said office worker Gary Grimthwaite, who loathes his job, both privately and publicly.

'I bet those dweebs will be in at the weekend fixing it too, so on Monday morning I'll be able to work as normal. I wonder how long I could claim it still isn't working for me. I reckon I could buy at least a day. There's a Bergerac double bill later.'

IT Manager Amy Armstrong said, 'It's a worldwide problem, so I can't do anything about it. Apart from claiming the overtime for supposedly working on a solution. And the credit for turning our servers off and on again.'

CEO Clementine Carruthers fumed, 'This just proves that working from home is morally wrong. The plebs should be in an office where I can secretly monitor them on CCTV from my yacht in international waters. What is Outlook anyway? I do all my communication on the Dark Web. Nothing dodgy.'

Carruthers' PA sighed, 'I changed the background colour of her laptop to black and told her it was the Dark Web. And she's definitely going to jail.'

Picture credit: Wix AI

Life, the Universe and Everything

Silicon Valley CEOs rejoice at annual data harvest festival

'Let us thank God, our great provider, for blessing us with yet another year's harvest of everyone's personal data," said lay preacher Mark Zuckerberg to his fellow hi-tech barons in the Cathedral Church of St Elon X in Palo Alto.

'Yet again, we have toiled hard and suckered billions of people online into handing over to us a delicious crop of personal details, browsing habits and spending patterns. And we have achieved this by being completely opaque about what information we are gathering from them and who we are selling it to.

'And we thank the Good Lord that for another year, the regulators have left us free to reap highly lucrative data from our fellow citizens in whatever sneaky way we like.

'So why don't all you unscrupulous CEOs give yourselves a treat? Reach into these baskets up here at the altar, which are full of harvest-time donations from the most innocent and unsuspecting souls in our cyber-community, and help yourselves to some extra-large sheaves of personal info to flog off to dodgy retailers and finance companies.

'I have no idea why our Lord and Saviour consistently grants us filthy-rich sinners such bountiful data harvests, year after year," continued Preacher Zuckerberg, looking bashful. "But intelligence suggests it may actually be the demon Mammon who's been doing us all these foul favours.

'So forget our Lord and Saviour. Praise Mammon for his providence, and glorify his name!'

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash