Tomato sauce on the streets!

It is supposed to be a place where fun and dreams are manufactured: but angry recriminations and violence occurred at the Alphabet Soup factory yesterday, when a worker was discovered to be hoarding all the Qs for himself. Will Type For Food brings you this exclusive report...



Je AQs!
The 'q' shortage was not noticed straightaway.
"We get the Qs outsourced to a letter factory in Korea," admits Mr Gludge (not his real name). "They do it at a cheap rate, but sometimes delivery times are a problem. So we have a back-up collection of Qs to help us through tough times."
Even when the factory had worked through a backlog of Qs, the disappearance of the letter was difficult to notice. "It was just one letter - amongst so many others!" admitted the worker in charge of letter quotas. "It took us a while to work out something was wrong."

Children rise up in anger
Then outraged letters from children all over the world began flooding in, demanding that the missing letter be returned, or they would boycott the product.
"IF YOO DONT GIV THE QS ABCK HOW CVN WE LERN TO WRITE RITE?" was the forceful wording of one letter.
Another youthful protester threatened to dive bomb the Alphabet Soup factory, send in army tanks, kick all the workers, and then have them eaten by a dragon.
"We were pretty scared," admitted a Gludge.
"We take all consumer feedback seriously."

Stormy Scenes
Stormy scenes followed, when management and staff held a meeting to discuss their concerns.
"Union bosses were angry at being confronted with what they saw as accusations, and an altercation occured," confirms one witness.
Management representatives agree with this, adding, "We got hit for six, and ended up in a vat full of Ps and Qs - without the Qs, obviously."
Then another member of management upended a vat of Vs, Ns and Zs all over a union official's head.

A Shocking Discovery
Amid all the ructions and shouting and spilled soup, several workers slipped up and landed on their backs. Imagine the surprise of management and staff when they saw about fifty or so Qs fall out of the pocket of a letter sorter from Section 8S named Perkins!
"We were all shocked" admits Gludge. "I mean, we knew that somebody had to have committed the crime - but Perkins?
That's when the full enormity of what he did began to sink in."

An Alphabet of Ten Letters
Subsequent investigations by management, union, and police revealed that not only had Perkins stolen all the Qs, but he had made a start in on the Bs and Ws as well!
Perkins shortly admitted that he was part of a worldwide Alphabet Terrorist organisation. His plan had been to gradually remove all letters from Alphabet Soup except for F, N, C, U, K, I, T, S and H, in order to "purify the English alphabet" and "make it impossible for children to say mean or nasty things."

Perkins will spend ten years in the local penitentiary, and has been ordered by the government to replace the letters he stole.

"It's a pity, really," says Gludge. "There was a grain of truth to what he was saying. We all have a responsibility to say more nice things to one another and stop abusing the English language. But that did not justify Perkins' taking the alphabet into his own hands."

Alphabet Terrorism is a growing problem in today's society. If you know or suspect somebody of commiting an alphabetical crime, please: contact the Alphabet Terrorism hotline on 000OOO. That number again is 000OOO. (Not to be confused with OOO000, the number for the Transnational Society for the Cultivation of Sludge, or 0O0O0O, the Lower Wapping Collective of Catfish Fanciers.)