The premise is simple: the busy business executive who spends all of his life at work comes to Chester Roadkill’s School for the Terminally Ill At Ease in Life (STIAEL) and spends at least one hour a day learning the language of the everyday, normal person.

“It’s a labour of love”, explains Chester. “CEOs are humans too, although they don’t really sound like humans. We’ve had some terrible, terrible cases of business executives who have been frozen out by their own families because they are no longer able to communicate properly with them. One managing director checked in after telling his family to ‘leverage the benefits of a wholly outsourced hygiene executive service’ when what he really meant was ‘get a maid’. He just couldn’t spit it out, so he’s on our total immersion programme.”

The same managing director had previously told his children to ‘re-analyse their core competencies vis-a-vis the holistic physical education programme laid out for them’ instead of ‘do some sport’, and further confused them by asking them to ‘push the envelope with some blue sky thinking in regard to the new canine naming strategy’ instead of ‘use your imagination and come up with a name for our new doggie.’

His children were reportedly so alarmed that they called Chester Roadkill’s School themselves.

Perigrin Albatross, CEO of HugeFoods Inc., is a newcomer to Chester’s school, and has so far found it highly rewarding: “Chester has been incentivising us to operationalise new linguistic capabilities – shit – I mean he’s got us talking real English. Heck, man, this is hard. I mean, I don’t get much time to spend with my family and when I do, I end up cascading information in a granular manner and they don’t have the bandwidth to…. shit, hang on. I’m doing it again.”

Albatross’s wife, Marie, says that he is making progress, but still slips back every now and again. “The other night, he offered to do the washing up, which was very sweet of him. At least, I think that’s what he was offering to do – he said he had a ten-point strategic plan to ameliorate plate cleansing processes and wanted to implement as soon as he had his ducks in a row. I’m getting better at understanding him, you know… we touched base offline and we’re now using a cradle-to-grave approach to in-house hygience maintenance – shit, I’m doing it myself!”

In a short speech to shareholders yesterday, Jihad declared “Al Qaeda is always looking at ways not just to rationalise our business, but to sow the seeds of growth. That is why we are raising our terror level threat to ‘thinking about it’, which represents a paradigm shift in the way our business operates.”

Although nobody really knew what Jihad was talking about, the raising of the terror threat to ‘thinking about it’ from ‘mulling it over’ is the one significant piece of information to be gleaned. Three months ago, the threat was merely ‘would like to, but can’t be bothered’, and a year ago it was ‘having a break from it all’. Analysts say that Al Qaeda’s business during the last 12 months has “shrunk significantly”, and the appointment of a new, hardline Human Resources Director has been the catalyst for change within the organisation.

“They have been resting on their laurels somewhat”, said Rupert Bingestock of Analysts Bingestock & Bloom. “Remember that many young terrorists are actually quite lazy, and Al Qaeda’s operations are strung out all over the world – it’s very hard to motivate them and keep them engaged. Their new HRD, Patricia al-Fayarya, has some great ideas about employee engagement, and one of them appears to be raising the terror level. It appears to have worked.”

Indeed, some junior terrorists, with relatively little experience, suddenly find themselves in Al Qaeda’s firing line. One, who wished to remain unnamed, said “I’ve only been in the job two months, and now I have to prove myself to the new HRD. I can’t go back to the job centre saying that I wasn’t up to scratch – what will my parents think of me? I’d better think of doing something soon before they raise the terror level threat to ‘really thinking about doing something now’, which is what we’re all worried about.”

Home Secretary Alan Johnson declared that the government was ‘actively thinking’ about raising its own terror level to ’shit your pants people of Britain’, but warned that until terrorists raised theirs to ‘we’re coming to getcha’, he wouldn’t be sounding the panic button. “Let’s remember a few years ago when the level of threat was ‘we’re behind yooouuuu’, and the amount of pant-pooping that was done back then. We don’t want to go there.”