Brooklyn, NY—Corporations across North America are eagerly embracing new necrotechnologies that enable them to employ the life-challenged.
“People are still a little uncomfortable with terms like ‘animated corpse’,” admits top HR consultant Mindy Axedame. “We prefer to refer to it as a kind of insourcing. We bring in the newly undeceased, which are an incredibly cost-effective resource for any company that needs non-managerial labor.”
Rick Flint, CEO of the popular online discount retailer Hawt Shawpz, is thrilled with the new employment trend. “Just last year, our entire call center was alive. We had to pay each of those 200 people $7 or $8 an hour. And they wanted sick leave, and health benefits—it was nuts. We only netted 14 million last year; I can’t afford frills and absenteeism.”
But since Hawt Shawpz started insourcing the life-challenged, Flint says, the company has become vastly more productive. “The dead don’t call in sick or slack off on Fridays. They don’t complain about rats in the walls. They’re never late, because we bus them in from our corporate crypt. It’s great! I can work a zombloyee for 20 hours straight for just $20 worth of pig brains.”
Hawt Shawpz system administrator Brad Janett says that running the zombloyee staff is fairly simple. “I do the most work getting them booting Linux properly and debugging their wetware programming. The disk image gives them a hundred or so phone scripts to recite. Zombloyees are usually bright enough to pick the right script, even if they’re not so good at forming words on their own.”
Janett says that the zombloyee’s cyberspiritual operating systems are extremely robust. “Pretty much the only problems we have are wetware failure. Mr. Flint thought we could do without air conditioning last summer, but then about a quarter of the call center mildewed.”
Don Frites, owner of the O’Burger diner chain, says that insourcing has been a boon to his company. He regrets that he can’t use the undead as much as he’d like.
“Midwestern restaurant patrons have some squeamishness issues,” says Frites. “They just aren’t ready to accept a zombie taking their order or dishing up their chili. Zombies are great behind the scenes; you just have to make sure the public can’t see them working.”
Frites is quick to add that undead restaurant employees don’t present any health risk to the public. “There’s still this perception that they’re these oozing corpses dropping parts everywhere, but that’s completely outdated. When properly plasticized, our zombloyees are cleaner than our regular employees—all you do is wipe them down with orange cleaner every shift to get the grease residue off.”
Ed Rudge, Outreach Director for Cybermantic Staffing Solutions Inc., sees a bright future for this latest form of corporate insourcing.
“There’s no limit to what businesses can do for their stockholders when employee living expenses are a thing of the past,” he says. “Every one of our clients tells us the same thing: the dead are resurrecting corporate profit margins in a big way.”