Verbal Override Requested
Chapter 20 in my ongoing story about workplace surveillance.
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Stamper wanted to act fast with Christopher, if only so she’d have a better sense of how to handle Cascade. She just didn’t figure she had all that much time before implacable Mitch Cascade drilled his way down to Christopher.
Given how pushy Christopher had been on the phishing thing—and what Keith had told her about some of his other resistance—she was hoping she could cherry pick one of the LPs to tap him on, maybe find something where he’d have to acknowledge that he could do better. She knew Chrisopher was arrogant as hell—and deservedly so. The dude was smart. But he was all too quick to assume that he knew more than everybody else, and she thought maybe that would be an area where he would admit he could improve.
If I could just tag him on “Learn and Be Curious,” she thought, he couldn’t resist that. Or “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.” Surely he’d acknowledge that he could improve here.
But she had to take what was there, and when she and Keith both got an alert in the middle of the next day, she knew they had to take it.
“Tap Alert,” said the notification that popped up simultaneously on her and Keith’s screens. “Christopher Dourado has triggered an LP tap on ‘Earn Trust.’ Will you accept the tap override?”
She had a few seconds to decide, knowing that Christopher would get an automated tap if she didn’t jump in pretty quickly. So she tapped Accept and Keith, who had been working in the empty office next door to hers, tucked into her office and closed the door. They had agreed that he’d write the messages, since he had a better sense of the way their chatbot syntax was constructed. He sat down at her computer.
“Hi Christopher, sorry to interrupt your meeting.”
“Look, can we do this later?” Christopher typed quickly. “My team needs my help in this meeting.”
“That’s why we tapped you Christopher. You seem to be missing a chance to ‘Earn Trust’ with your colleagues on the Dev team.”
“Not now!” muttered Christopher. He tried to Alt-X to close the chat window and return to his meeting, but he had long ago had this privilege lifted. This was only available to people with less than two taps a quarter. “Fuck!” he grumbled. So he typed his reply: “Got it, ‘Earn Trust,’ I’ll do better. But I don’t have time for you to re-educate me on the LPs right now. Just let me get back to this meeting!”
Keith and Stamper looked at each other—should they just let it go?
“Please?” typed Christopher.
Neither Keith nor Stamper were in this to bust people. They both prized collegiality and cooperation—it’s what had led them into this division in the first place. But they both sensed that Christopher was a growing problem that they had to contain. Stamper looked Keith in the eye and shook her head no.
Keith started typing right away:
“I’m sorry, Christopher. ‘Earn Trust’ is too important. Your team will do fine without you. After all, we ‘Hire and Develop the Best,’ and your team, like you, is ‘Right, A Lot.’”
Stamper had to admit that Keith could sling the LPs with the best of them. Like many Amazonians, she sometimes felt like the most prized skill at Amazon was the ability to manipulate LPs to get your way. After all, they couldn’t really be questioned, though they could be shaped to mean almost anything.
The three-dot typing bubble told them that Christopher was shaping a reply, but then a pop-up window appeared on their screen: Verbal Override Requested.
They’d installed the Request Verbal Override button fairly recently, after getting several complaints about people being frustrated by interactions with the chatbot. Keith was sure that several of the complaints came from Christopher. They just sounded like him. Still, it had been an easy enough feature to install in their chat module and it was barely used. Keith’s team found that most people just wanted to end the exchange and get back to work. But not Christopher.
Keith prepared to click Accept Verbal Override, but Stamper put her hand on his forearm. “You’ve got to do the talking, Keith. He’ll know it’s me.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got the voice masking on—it converts everything we say into Huddy’s voice,” said Keith.
“I know,” she replied, “I’m just worried that he’ll know my phrasing, or something. I just can’t do it.” Stamper couldn’t believe it was her saying these words—she didn’t back away from anything. But having this be her first conversation with Christopher in years was just too much. “Please?”
“Fine, no problem,” said Keith. “We better start now or the system will deny the override.” And he clicked the button.
“C’mon guys,” said Christopher. “Don’t you have any sense of when you’ve gone too far?”
“Hello Christopher, I’m part of the HD team,” replied Keith in as neutral a tone as possible ... though his neutrality was hardly needed, since Huddy voice masking did the neutralizing for him. “We’re just trying to help you be the best Amazonian you can be.”
Keith wasn’t this soulless—this was the standard HD script for when interactions with employees got a little testy. In fact, his heart was beating fast and he was concentrating hard to try to guide this to a decent outcome. How he wished he could confer with Stamper about what that outcome should be!
“Has it ever occurred to you motherfuckers that trying to squeeze people into a little box wasn’t going to make them the best fucking Amazonians!” growled Christopher. “This is getting ridiculous.”
“We want to help you improve on ‘Earns Trust,’” replied Keith, trying to steer this away from confrontation. He wasn’t going to argue with Christopher.
“I’ll tell you how you can help me improve on ‘Earns Trust,’” Christopher shot back. “You can let me talk directly to whoever is running this shit show. Because they need to hear that it’s NOT FUCKING WORKING.”
Keith looked at Stamper, mouthing the words “What do I say?” They were so far from the scripts, and so very far from Keith’s capacity to handle confrontation. Keith was nearly paralyzed. Stamper thought she saw tears in his eyes.
“Hello???” said Christopher sarcastically. “Did I throw you off your canned bullshit responses?”
“I’ll take it,” said Stamper—and the voice masking did its job.
“You’ll take what?” asked Christopher.
Stamper clicked the button on the console to turn off voice masking.
“Christopher,” she said, her unmasked voice a blend of warmth and sadness, anger and resignation, “it’s Kate Stamper. I’d be happy to talk with you.”
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