I can imagine the conversation now "sorry Ben, some one seniors gotta carry the can for the phuck up, we'll look after you, we'll always need modems Ben, you can trust us Ben"

in other news Emma Sanderson will be serving chipped potato within the prestigious British Telecom Tower restaurant

Sounds like wishful thinking on your part Alex. Believe it or not Ben Verwaayen was a major asset for BT and there's no doubt that Alcatel-Lucent's gain is BT's loss.

ben opens his browser and gets a targetted job ad from PHORM, then suddenly realises he had an unread email containing his BT Notice to quit.....damn them deep packet inspections are good he thinks

When they sold one of the golf courses and two of the Learjets.

Yet another management change, I have an inbox rule to move them straight to the trash.

They should have gone the whole nine yards and hired Carli Fiorina.

At the time time of the merger I heard someody describe is as "like two garbage trucks crashing head on".

Please be kind to Plan 9 and Bell-Labs, it's been hellish for years, they even removed every other light bulb but I guess that didn't have much impact on the $1bn after all.

http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/plan9/curse_of_glenda.html

Bell-Labs inventing the future since forever - the transistor and the CCD and Unix and C and and ......

Oh though there is some shit in there, I'm looking at you C++ (he got upset when the guys in the Unix lab were non-plussed)

...that Alcatel-Lucent are the company behind Project Rialto/Kindsight, a phormette. Isn't it amazing where these BT bods keep ending up?

you're a little late. I think she of the immovable hair already had the job of can carrier. "Announce disastrous profits, fire a bunch, repeat, rince ... OK, off you, here's a big wad of cash".

Doesn't mean the future will be any better of course.

Paris cos she likes to blow her job too.