Breaking News*: Employee Finds Promotion Letter In Junk Mail

Hyderabad: Life has taken a new turn for Suresh Kumar LKP, an IT professional in the city. Unlike most of his peers, he has something to be happy about at work in these troubled times.

In a desperate attempt to look busy at work, Kumar has been manually reading and deleting each piece of junk mail in his inbox since last week. This activity is being carried on in almost every cubicle ever since research revealed that Outlook had a 5% edge over Excel as the most important-looking thing you can have open during a surprise check.

However, this afternoon, in the pile of subscription offers to the Economist and the mouse-not-working complaints directed to the OTHER Suresh Kumar (LPK) but inevitably marked to him, Kumar discovered an email from Human Resources, informing him that effective September last year, he has been promoted to Level 67.35 from the earlier 66.87, which translates into a 3% salary hike and an increased conveyance allowance of Rs 400 per month. Kumar says he had completely forgotten that his office went paperless a few months ago, and when his boss had walked over to his desk last September to say "Hope you are happy now", he had assumed it was a reference to the boss having resigned just minutes ago.

Kumar is in talks with Payroll to find out why the hike is not showing up in his monthly paycheck, and is now likely to get a bulk arrears payout, which will reduce his travel time to office by 15 minutes daily, since he will no longer have to take the long route to avoid the grocery shop where he has three months of unpaid bills.

Kumar also discovered a letter of dismissal dated October, but was relieved to find that it was meant for the OTHER Suresh Kumar, who has been fired for stealing the screens of laptops he was supposed to repair, and replacing them with cardboard dummies that had printouts of Microsoft Outlook screenshots stuck over them. His criminal career of 3 years is believed to have been brought to light by a new hire, one of the few to land a job in the company despite having no MBA degree.

*Harassed readers are assured that news will stop breaking as soon as this reporter finds something better to do.