The looming UK recession gives managers the opportunity to achieve infamy through the cack-handed implementation of redundancies. Standards of worst practice are high. Last year, for example, Robbs, a north-east department store, staged a fire alert in order to gather employees in the car park and give them the collective boot. Relief at escaping incineration was presumably supposed to blot out the shock of unemployment.

KPMG upped the technological ante during a 2001 restructuring by e-mailing 700 staff with the news they would be made redundant. But the gold standard for brutally dumping workers was set by The Accident Group, the ambulance-chasing claims company set up by Mark Langford. In 2003 it terminated the contracts of 2,500 staff by text message.