Stamper Takes an Override
Chapter 17 in my ongoing story about workplace surveillance
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Stamper’s first challenge was to figure out what Christopher was up to! She had heard through the grapevine that Christopher had joined Amazon, but in a company that employed well over a million people, she didn’t figure she’d ever run into him. She wasn’t sure how she felt about reconnecting with Christopher.
They had parted on kind of weird terms: years ago, when they both worked at Wizards of WBT, Stamper had been really interested in him, despite him being quite a bit younger. They had gotten pretty tight there for a while, so tight that all their coworkers wondered if the “work hubby” jokes masked a more intense relationship. But then one day, Stamper had turned her attention to someone else—she couldn’t remember who—and Christopher wondered what the hell he had done. But he never said anything about it and nor did she, and they went their separate ways—with both of them wondering what might have been if things had gone differently. They hadn’t pined for each other, just wondered, in the way that you wonder about an old flame.
And now here was Stamper, discovering that the first real “challenge” to her program came from a guy she really liked, a smart, affable guy who seemed to be impressing everyone he met at Amazon. This could be interesting.
She decided that the best way for her to “get to know” why Christopher was balking at taps was to redirect some of his Huddy human overrides to her for a bit. She had jumped into Huddy interactions from time to time, just to see how they worked, but it had always just been a way to test drive one of her program features. She had never before had a solid objective in mind. But this time she did: she wanted to figure out if Christopher was probing at a weakness in her Human Dynamics program that she hadn’t anticipated.
She got her first chance pretty quickly, when Christopher got a tap for clicking on one of their regular simulated phishing attempts. Christopher clicked a link in an email and Huddy automatically locked his comms and popped up a chat message: “Christopher, that was a simulated phishing campaign, and you’ve violated a security protocol for the fourth time.” The system pinged Stamper at the same time, and she seamlessly hopped into the driver’s seat in place of the chatbot when Christopher replied.
“No shit, Huddy, it was obviously a simulated phishing campaign. Why can’t you guys create more convincing fakes? Do you think we’re idiots?”
Wow! Thought Stamper. She hadn’t expected belligerence.
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” was the response that the chatbot suggested, and Stamper pressed Send to use it, just to buy herself some time. But Christopher didn’t give her much time; he responded right away.
“C’mon Huddy, or whoever has taken over the controls. You know exactly what I mean: these simulated phishes are stupid. I clicked on it to tell you you’re wasting my time.”
The chatbot didn’t have a canned response for this one—it had flagged a human override after Christopher’s first antagonistic reply and it only gave the human one level of cover before they’d have to reply. Stamper wracked her brain to remember the rules for simulating chatbot interactions. When she replied, she didn’t want it to feel too human—they wanted to always maintain the plausibility that all the interactions came from a chatbot.
“We don’t think you’re stupid,” typed Stamper.
“Then either use simulated phishes that are more intelligent or leave me alone, FFS,” typed Christopher.
Stamper, flustered, wrote: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand FFS.” She was trying to buy some time.
“Bullshit—I use FFS all the time, and you’ve understood it in the past. All you’re telling me is I’m no longer interacting with the chatbot.”
“We just want to help you avoid security incidents,” typed Stamper, now thoroughly on her heels.
“I’ve never had a real security incident in my life, and I want you to quit wasting my time,” Christopher shot back.
“We’ll note your concerns, Christopher,” typed Stamper.
“And is this tap going to count against me?” he prodded.
“We won’t count this tap against you,” typed Stamper, even as she canceled the tap report that the system had generated.
“Good—now turn my access back on so I can get to work!” Stamper could almost hear Christopher smashing the keys as he wrote this. She reinstated his access and closed the chat window.
Well hell, she thought to herself. This is not what I expected.
Stamper reached out to Keith shortly after this troubling exchange.
“Have you done the Huddy overrides with Christopher?” she asked when they got together—but only after she had closed her office doors. She didn’t tell him about her exchange with Christopher.
“Yeah, I’ve done a couple,” Keith admitted. In fact, he’d been doing them almost exclusively for a couple weeks, ever since it had become obvious that Christopher was triggering the human override nearly every time. He seemed to know how to push the right “buttons” to get away from the chatbot.
“Why can’t I find the chat logs?” she asked. Each chat log—no matter where it took place, phone, Chime, Slack—was transcribed and attached to the employee’s Pulse report. She figured she could look at the logs to figure out if this was a pattern ... but all she could find were tap errors and empty chat logs associated with Christopher.
“Well, I declined to keep a few of the chat logs from our interactions,” said Keith. That was his way of saying he had deleted them, and they both knew it.
Stamper looked him square in the eyes: “Keith, why?”
“I guess I thought they could be misinterpreted or taken out of context,” he replied.
“I don’t understand,” she said, recognizing that he must have faced the same belligerence she had. “How?”
“Well, Christopher can be pretty, uh, colorful, and I just thought that if someone was reading the transcript without a lot of context, they might get the wrong idea.”
“What kind of wrong idea?” Stamper pressed.
“Like they might misunderstand,” said Keith.
“Keith!! I need you to be more direct with me. You’re not in trouble. What’s in there that could be misread?”
Keith wanted this to go away. He wanted to pretend it never happened and he wanted to just carry on with his work, nice and simple and clean. He took a deep breath, looked out the window, fidgeted with the sleeve on his shirt. Did he have to answer this question? Why the hell did this Dourado guy have to cause so much trouble?
“Keith?” Stamper said gently, resting her hand on his forearm. Dan had told her that Keith could keep things bottled up pretty tight. She knew that coming on strong wasn’t likely to help matters; that’s partly why she wanted to keep Cascade from coming directly after Keith. Cascade was a battering ram. “You can trust me, I promise. We want the same thing.”
“What do we want?” said Keith, his voice catching. “Tell me what we want.”
“Keith, what I want us to create is a system that helps employees do their best work by eliminating unnecessary distractions and by optimizing the instruction and guidance we give them. That’s really all I’m after. Isn’t that what you want too?”
“Yeah, totally,” Keith sighed with relief, “—it’s great to hear you say it, that’s exactly what I want.”
“So Keith, what’s in the logs with Christopher that could be misread?”
There was only one path left for Keith and that was the truth, so he spilled it out: “Christopher gets so angry and mean. He just blows everything out of proportion! He thinks the taps are a nuisance and he accused me ... sorry, he accused Human Dynamics of trying to keep him in a cage, of keeping everybody in a cage.”
“Did he say that?”
“Pretty much. He said stuff like ‘I’m not your trained monkey’ and ‘Why don’t you get off my back?’ I just didn’t think that should float around in the chat logs. I think some people could misunderstand that.”
“So what did you do with these logs?” asked Stamper.
“I purged them. I just deleted the whole tap and all the follow-up. I thought maybe I could head this off at the pass, but ...”
“But?”
“But then I started to see tap rates increasing elsewhere on his team ... that’s when I started looking at that data I shared with you and that’s when I created that Daily Pulse question. I knew I needed more data.”
“Okay, well listen, is there anything else? Is there more I need to know about?”
“No, no, that’s about it. I’m not sure what else to do.”
“Well listen, you don’t have to deal with this alone. I’ll work on this with you. Maybe we just need to tweak some of our tap language, rewrite our correction scripts. I know Christopher, he’s a little prone to ... exaggeration. He likes to make things seem more dramatic than they really are.”
“No kidding! You’d think we were spying on him, the way he acts. We’re just doing our jobs, trying to help people do their jobs.” This is how Keith comforts himself: he tells himself that all is going according to plan. “But I can’t keep grabbing all of Christopher’s interactions—there are just too many. What are we going to do with these?”
“Keith, I know: I took one of Christopher’s interactions just the other day, ” she told him. “I know what you’re dealing with. We can work on these together. In fact, let’s set it up so that we both get pinged the moment the next interaction starts, maybe we can both be there.”
“Yeah, that sounds great. I’ll set it up,” said Keith, relieved to have a plan. “And Stamper?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you!”
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