CERN SCIENTISTS are using highly sensitive instrumentation to discover if any work is done in the week before Christmas.
The Large Hadron Collider, capable of detecting tiny interactions between subatomic particles, will be trained on the UK to see if even the smallest productive action occurs over the next five days.
Professor Helen Archer said: “Everyone will be at their desks, certainly, and there’ll be enough mouse-clicking to fool most forms of spectroscopic analysis and middle-managers.
“But work, in the scientific sense of the motion of a system against a force or the colloquial sense of that shit you get paid for, is not thought to happen.”
The study follows the 2009 invalidation of Executive Theory, which conclusively showed that senior managers aren’t in important meetings but are instead getting drunk over lunch.
Risk manager Tom Booker said: “Our office is exceptionally busy at this time of year shopping online, writing each other Christmas cards and sticking tinsel around our monitors.
“It’s so frantic, I barely have time to put my out-of-office email on before grabbing a double fistful of Celebrations.”
Results of the observation are expected to be inconclusive because the scientists who should be taking down results are making a model of molybdenum’s atomic structure out of paperclips and Post-Its.
