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So pervasive is the sense of unease that still lingers on Paramount's Melrose lot that a brief phone outage early yesterday evening prompted e-mails from our operatives speculating that the service interruption was caused by an alien takeover, or, perhaps even more amusingly, studio head Brad Grey's failure to pay the phone bill. (We've heard he's a micromanager, but that's ridiculous—it's far more likely he laid off the guy in charge of paying the bill.) Things seem to be in working order this morning (at least the DreamWorks robot who replaced the previous automated Paramount operator was answering), so either the alien putsch went smoothly after that initial telecommunications hiccup, or someone finally settled up the phone account. Everyone can return to their cubicles today with the exact same worries they had yesterday morning.