Normally I can chuckle at El Reg's hyperbolic sense of humour, because it tends to have at least some connection with logic and reality. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with telephone sanitizers. Unless in some weird parallel universe "sanitizer" is now a synonym for technician or engineer.
The original joke was that people specifically employed to _clean_ telephone equipment - not those responsible for its functionality - were deemed useless to society, although (spoiler alert) that assumption may have been a grave mistake on the part of the Golgafrinchans...
> Normally I can chuckle at El Reg's hyperbolic sense of humour,
Since El Reg's increasing focus on the US market, their sense of humor (note the lack of a U), and what made them 'different' from the rest, has been in terminal decline.....
Though we will always have Paris. [1]
[1] A common snarky reference on Reg comment boards, referring to the removal of the Paris Hilton icon. A change that was no doubt made to avoid offending US lawyers.
Yep, they forced the mis-characterization to be able to cite Douglas Adams in the title and make it clickbait.
Besides, the episode/anecdote in itself is not particularly fun and - at the most - the telephone technician could have been accused of being a bit overzealous, but long before that "Walt" did actually mis-wire the telephone system (which seemingly was not even their exclusive property, but common with the building one).
The original joke was that people specifically employed to _clean_ telephone equipment - not those responsible for its functionality - were deemed useless to society, although (spoiler alert) that assumption may have been a grave mistake on the part of the Golgafrinchans...