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Offices across the UK are reporting their highest attendance since the 2020 Pandemic as employees shun working from home to embrace an environment with air conditioning.


"We're seeing our best June for in-office working and sickness absences," said one head of HR. "Usually when it's a bit sunny we get lots of fortuitous tummy-bugs and non-specific illnesses. However, now the mercury's crept into the high-20's, people seem a lot more ready to get on with the tasks at hand so long as they can do them in a climate-controlled building."


Many companies are struggling to cope with the influx of people, having reduced their number of desks and office space in the expectation hybrid working would remain commonplace. "It's full to bursting out there," one company director told us. "So we've had to take a page out of the NHS's books and set people up at temporary workstations in corridors. Most are ok with it so long as they're within six feet of an air vent. We'd tried everything for bringing people back from their homes: Team-building sessions, discounted coffee, relaxed clothing rules on a Friday; it turns out all we needed was climate change to keep doing what it's doing."


With temperatures set to peak over the weekend, requests for overtime are also at an all-time high. "At this rate, we're going to run out of jobs to do and have people reorganising the stationary cupboard. If it doesn't cool down and staff don't get back to their kitchen tables and doing chores in parallel to working, we may have to consider redundancies, or hoping that all this close-proximity working causes another outbreak of something and a need to send everyone home."


image from pixabay



In the never-ending quest for increased productivity, the corporate world has stumbled upon a ground-breaking solution: Iron Maiden Toilet Seats. From the innovators of the anti-suicide nets in Shenzhen Apple factories comes this exciting invention that is sure to leave any CEO salivating.


Gone are the days of employees idly scrolling through social media or taking unnecessarily long bathroom breaks. With the bed-of-nails toilet seat, employees can enjoy up to 20 seconds of unskewered toilet time before the spikes begin to rise slowly out of the porcelain throne like that scene in The Temple of Doom.


For those too numb with existential ennui to feel their buttocks being impaled, the spikes will administer an injection of caffeine and methamphetamines to stimulate an ebullient motivation to work.


‘At first we took a lot of inspiration from hostile architecture,’ a senior manager tells us. ‘We started by tilting the seats at 13 degrees to make toilet breaks more miserable, but it only led to a 25% decrease in time spent on comfort breaks. After that we exaggerated the slope to 90 degrees, but amazingly they were still managing to dawdle. Then we introduced the Genital Grabbing Sewer Goblins, but they soon began unionizing over their lack of health insurance. The spiked toilet seat is by far the most cost-effective solution.’


‘I miss the goblins,’ warehouse worker Andrew Perez tells us. ‘It’s been so long since I’ve felt the touch of my wife that the physical contact filled a void inside me. Sarah, if you’re out there, I miss you, my love. Tell the kids that Daddy will be home soon.’



First published 2 June 2023



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