Month: October 2001

Futurefeedforward Cuts 18,000 Jobs

October 24, 2001
NEW HAVEN–Citing recent weakness in networking and telecommunications equipment spending and a market for IT products “softened by a general downtrend in corporate earnings and by increasing uncertainty about the near-term future,” Futurefeedforward CEO Redroe “Red” Boudaine announced Wednesday that the company plans to “pursue the world’s first trans-temporal corporate restructuring” in an effort to “return the revenue pyramid to an upright posture.”

Noting that the company is currently in sound financial shape, Mr. Boudaine went on to explain that undisclosed financial events some 50 years in the future necessitate a pre-emptive restructuring. “Our proprietary temporal network affords us access to key information about future developments both inside and outside the company,” explained Boudaine. “Today’s announcement is just our management leveraging our own technology to make sound business decisions.”

The bizarre plan calls for the Connecticut-based start-up to layoff some 18,000 workers who have not yet been hired. “The cuts come largely from upper management,” noted Boudaine. “They’re spread over about a dozen years and concentrated in our fast-food and consumer amusement divisions. Frankly, I was shocked to learn that we’ll be entering the fast-food business at all and wanted to take steps now to keep us out of it.”

The company broke the news to workers by mail, in many cases notifying parents that their as-yet unborn children, and in some cases grandchildren, are being laid off by a company they didn’t even know existed. “It was pretty strange,” admitted a Des Moines insurance adjuster who received a notice earlier in the week. “This letter said that my daughter ‘Janey Marionatti’ was being laid off by some computer company or something. I don’t have a daughter. I don’t have any kids. I don’t even have any plans to get married. The severance package was attractive, though, and they offered a scholarship to ‘retrain’ my kid before she goes into whatever line of work she was going to go into. All-in-all it’s a pretty nice way to lose your job.”

Responding to questions about the restructuring, Futurefeedforward CFO Emily Efou emphasized the company’s commitment to “progressive, fiscally sound labor practices, including job re-training and pre-emptive out-placement. This restructuring also allows us to take advantage of a paradigm-scale inefficiency in financial markets,” noted Efou. “This gives us an opportunity to pay out severance and restructuring costs in present dollars. In the near-term that appears inefficient, but, once markets adjust to our technology and future dollars surpass present dollars in value, we’ll be sitting pretty.”

Asked about recent disruptions in the company’s publicly-disseminated weekly newsfeed, Boudaine admitted that delays in the service were the result of “small-scale, sympathetic work stoppages by future-side employees” and sought to reassure clients and investors that the company remains fit and focused: “There’s no need for any doubt or discomfort,” exclaimed Boudaine. “Our vision is deep and resilient. I’ve got the future in my pocket. You know that all-seeing eye on top of the pyramid? That’s me up there.”

Gates Suffers General Protection Fault

August 8, 2021
REDMOND–A recently leaked internal company memorandum has confirmed that Microsoft Chairman Emeritus Bill Gates’ collapse last Thursday was related to his participation in testing of the company’s beta-stage development of an operating system for the human genome. Marked CONFIDENTIAL and addressed to members of Microsoft’s Board of Directors, the memorandum admitted frankly that Gates’ mysterious condition was “a result of Chairman Gates’ direct participation in the development of W[indows for the] G[enome],” and sought to reassure Board members that the incident “does not represent a threat either to the established launch schedule or to the integrity of Bill’s leadership.”

Witnesses to Gates’ collapse during last week’s annual shareholders’ meeting describe a lucid, vital Gates speaking to the assembled crowd for nearly an hour before beginning to show signs of trouble. “He was really on a roll,” recalls one shareholder present at the meeting. “He was going on about physics being an open-source OS for the universe and being the number one threat to Microsoft when, all of the sudden, he stopped talking mid-sentence. He just froze. Then somebody up on the stage tapped him on the shoulder and he seemed to come out of it for a couple minutes until he just fell over, stiff as a board, muttering something over and over.”

Other witnesses, including insiders at the Pacific Technology Executives’ Medical Center where Gates received initial treatment, confirm that he has fallen into a fugue state characterized by “deep, universal muscle rigidity” and “compulsive glossolalia.” “He was blue!” exclaims one hospital insider. “I mean really blue. Not just hypoxic, but this really weird, deep blue. I’ve never seen anything else like it. And he just kept repeating the same thing over and over again, something about a general protection fault in gene 23Xw something. The whole thing gave me the creeps.”

Gates’ collapse and the leaked response memo appear to confirm rumors that Microsoft’s ultra-secret ‘Bangkok’ project aims to extend the company’s franchise into the realm of gene therapy and genetic trait manipulation. “For a long time Gates has been talking about the need for a way to standardize and coordinate gene manipulation functions across phenotypes,” notes industry analyst Juliet Joliet. “Bangkok almost certainly involves the development of a Windows-brand platform for standardizing and controlling the interface between manipulation products and the underlying genetic hardware.”

Describing Gates’ condition as “significant but trivial,” the internal memo provides hints about the company’s plans for Windows for the Genome, including mention of government review of terms in developer agreements qualifying disclosure of the product’s “TPI” or “Trait Programming Interface:” “We have reason to believe that confidential FTC approval is at a sensitive stage,” notes the memo. “We cannot stress enough the need for the Board to present a confident, united response to the Chairman’s incapacitation.”

Information concerning Gates’ prognosis has been scarce since his transfer to his private Mercer Island medical facility, but sources close to the Board hope for a rapid and full recovery. Discussing treatment measures planned by the company’s engineers, the confidential internal memo notes that “absent a more elegant solution, the reported afunctionality can be resolved by reformatting the Chairman and doing a clean reinstall of the product.”