Ladies and Gentlefolk,
On behalf of everybody at the New Grunsford News, we would officially like to apologise without reservation or fear of distraction, for getting caught hacking your phones.
It was not a path we trod deliberately, or even realised we were doing it at the time, but one day one of our reporters – I forget who – phoned up a source for a story and got his messaging service and, in rage and frustration, accidentally typed in the default code that the operator uses for all people who haven’t set the PIN on their messages. He then, accidentally, listened to all those messages, recorded them on a dictaphone he accidentally held distressingly close to the speaker of his phone, and then – with an absence of deliberation that he would come to regret forever – converted them to MP3 format, saved them to the company intranet, and authorised for a transcription service to turn them into text. A terrible and complete accident such as this undoubtably is, we cannot but hope, merely the striking lightning of misfortune. Such an act of inattentiveness could never befall the same company twice, you would think. Alas, that was not to be so. It was barely a week later when another reporter with such terrible luck that cannot be imagined fell victim to the same such series of events, but with the added misfortune of deleting some of the messages in the process.
We explain this in such depth to demonstrate the whims of misfortune and technology that we have been subjected to. I mean, who within our number hasn’t fallen victim to a paper jam just when your deadline is approaching. There was no way we could possibly have known, or could be held culpable for such an act of fate. That we appeared to have put money aside to pay off the results of our actions was merely an act of accountancy we were unaware of, and the mislabelling of our church orphans roof repair fund compounded the error. We apologise for all the poor, damp orphans who are now being rained on as a result of us having to repurpose the fund.
In conclusion, despite the fact this was nothing but a misunderstanding done in the aid of the public interest and was good and worthwhile journalism although it was, as you see, a complete accident I couldn’t have predicted and known anything about, we are humbly sorry, and will shut down the newspaper and move all the reporters to a new – but entirely different – newspaper. We hope you are sated by this public act of entirely genuine contrition.
Humbly yours,
J. Maddock esq.