British Telecom announces date for time travel

AS WAR rages in the Middle East and our government throws bodies at a conflict in Afghanistan, BT is asking the nation to celebrate 80 years of traffic lights.

Tomorrow (3rd August) marks the 80th anniversary of the first operational traffic light in London. Britain's national telecom operator (AKA British Telecom) is particularly excited as it currently manages around 40,000 traffic lights in London alone!

But what has happened during this timeframe, asks Bite, BT's PR company, in a press release that must have been some sort of end of the month contractual obligation. And what can we expect the streets of London to look like 80 years from now?

In celebration of the great service that BT had offered us all over the years, the impeccable punctuality of its engineers and openness and transparency of its pricing policies, we've asked a number of experts to tackle these burning questions of the day.

"A lot has happened in the last 80 years," said one historian. "I think they need to be a bit more specific. And what the bloody hell is a timeframe?"

A timeframe, according to social historians, became the new measure of time in the marketing and PR community, around ten years ago. However, the word timeframe is not expected to become mainstream until around 2016, when we can expect to hear it used in popular phrases such as: "Sorry mate, have you got the right timeframe?"

According to research, in the last 80 years BT engineers have turned up, at the expected timeframe, several timeframes a year.

We've also witnessed traffic lights changing quite frequently, according to another expert, who begged to remain nameless.

"If we look at the role traffic lights have to play in our everyday lives it's an important one," said a frankly unbelievable press release, put out by Bite. It continues: "You can imagine the chaos on our roads if they weren't there. And it wouldn't only be chaos for car users, think about buses too - and how could pedestrians cross busy roads safely without traffic lights?"

How indeed, Professor Norman Stone might have said, if we'd been stupid enough to phone Oxford University.

But BT, and traffic lights, aren't just about the past, Bite PR reminds us. We have to look at the future.

BT's Technology Timeline predicts the following events:

Cars with automatic steering, expected around the years 2008 - 2012. (So make sure you take time off work to wait in for the engineers to arrive)

Speed controlled automatically: expected around 2011-2015. (Don't even go to the toilet between these years, or they'll drop one of those "While You Were Out" cards through the letterbox)

Fully automated-piloted cars, expected between the years 2016-2020 (I'm not making this up!)

Time travel, which according to BT should be invented around 2051 onwards which should coincide with:

Faster than light travel, 2051 onwards. µ

INQBLOT 1 If you would like to speak to BT concerning the current management of traffic networks, the innovation and research that BT is conducting in the transport industry, or to one of BT's futurologists on what our roads will look like in the future, please contact a member of the team at Bite Communications.