Panic struck DWF this week after RollOnFriday's report that it had emailed its staff to say there would be no payrises or firmwide bonuses, despite the year's record profits (although the Managing Partner would be keeping his chauffeur). Concerned that their evil plans might be thwarted, DWF masterminds ordered RollOnFriday to be eliminated and blocked access to the offending story.

RollOnFriday was inundated with emails from DWF lawyers complaining that their attempts to read the story were met with a message saying that access had been blocked because of “inappropriate or unlawful material”. As staff fumed at this blatant porky, which “only generated further resentment”, the firm did a U-turn and allowed access again.

Computer says no

All this might seem like quite an extreme effort in the firm's mission to alienate its beleaguered staff. However, a spokeswoman said that the story had been blocked “in accordance with our IT policy. The message referring to inappropriate or unlawful material was generated automatically by our IT system and has now been changed”.

Although after a bit of prodding she confessed that it was actually blocked because too many people were looking at the story. Apparently it was “taken down between 11:30am and 3:00pm because there was excessive usage of the internet during working hours”.