Results exceed projected budget savings
Washington, DC - An executive order signed by President Bush on June 5 authorized the use of undead soldiers to supplement staffing at the U.S. Patent and Trademark office. According to Gerald Smith, an accounting technician overseeing USPTO payroll, this order provided for 50 undead to sort the increasing number of patent applications that the office receives.
"The obvious benefit of undead laborers within government is that they work unpaid, and that is what we based our budget forecasts on," Smith said. "What we hadn't anticipated was how efficiently the undead work. And because they ate most of their living supevisors and coworkers, we've been able to cut our payroll budget in half."
These undead workers have been able to effectively eliminate the backlog of applications, literally piled into bins on the loading docks of the Patent Office. Intellectual property experts herald this as a remarkable achievement, which should pave the way for better quality patent investigation at the office.
"The Patent Office has had to deal with a very negative public perception lately, what with issuing patents for Swinging Sideways on a Swing (patent #6,368,227) or Amusing Your Cat with a Laser Pointer (patent #5,443,036)," says Richard Oberwelt, a lawyer for the Popular Patents Association. "With the application backlog cleaned up, the [zombie] patent clerks will be able to more thoroughly examine the claims that the applications make, and perform a more thorough search for prior art which could invalidate the patents."
ACLU lawyers today filed a class action suit against the U.S. goverment on behalf of the undead workers, alleging that government's refusal to pay the workers fair wages, only allowing them to feast on the brains and vital organs of illegal immigrants and death row prisoners amounts to slavery.
Justice Department officials dismiss the ACLU suit as rubbish, while White House officials praised the undead for their remarkable work at the Patent Office, and remained open to the possibility of filling other goverment agencies with zombie workers.
