Musings from Work

#FrankHerfort

Thankfully, there are no open stairs in my workplace.  All the stairs in the building are tucked snugly behind doors, in narrow hallways, or otherwise concealed away from the main area where I, and my myriad coworkers, labour in order to produce wealth.  Not our own wealth, mind you.  No, we are neither emperors nor gods.  Wealth, it seems, belongs to the wealthy, and thus, it is they for whom we toil, receiving with thanks the price they pay for the priceless hours of our lives.

As I say, I'm grateful that there are no open staircases.  If there were, it would be possible to look from on high down onto this place.  From such a vantage point, one would see all the more clearly the drudgery that makes all too real the damnable phrase "day in; day out".  Here we sit, attention fixed to a lifeless machine before us, displaying information on a dimly lit screen about men and women who remain relevant to us only for the few moments we interact with them through the telephone.  From above, one would see us leashed by headsets to our desks, hearing the demands of people who never see our faces, and whose faces we never see.  Row on row, we would seem as drones, with faces blurring together, obscuring our individual identity even more than the faceless servitude we give those who demand our service.

 

A curious thing, these call centers are.  On the one hand, those who deal with large corporations demand the ability to interact with humans rather than machines.  But when they do, they seldom behave as if they are speaking with human beings.  Separating the face and the voice creates a void through which nothing passes but electrical impulses racing at the speed of light through wires – or even the air itself – into our ears, and back from our mouths through the same void back into their ears.

Yet they say, "I don't want to talk to a machine!"

You are talking to a machine, sir or ma'am.  Your telephone, be it a device on your desk or a device in your pocket has neither flesh nor blood, to say nothing of the lacking soul or moral judgment.  That device – that machine – in turn is speaking to a computer server – another machine – which is firing an electrical version of your voice to a machine here in this place of toil, which sends it to the machine currently perched on my head.

You only think you're speaking to a human being.  You aren't.  If you were, you'd likely speak very differently than you do.  You would speak as to a human being.  Instead, you speak as to a lifeless, soulless, utterly impotent machine.

And if there were open staircases here, one would see us all, toiling here as if we were machines, being treated as machines, faithfully producing wealth as machines, and slowly – oh so slowly – becoming that very thing which the people whose voices we electrically hear demand not to talk to.

Of course, I don't wish to seem ungrateful.  I am neither poverty-stricken nor tied to this place as a form of self-identification.  I merely recognize that, though this is my source of income – a mere pittance compared to the untold riches I bring to my employer – I maintain my own humanity outside this place.  I do not live here.  I work here.  I live out there, where people see my face.  I live where people see more than a disembodied voice, where smiles can be contagious, hands can be held, arms can embrace, and the intricacies of a flick of fingers, a wink in the eye, or a nod of the head communicate so much more, and where love is expressed in a far truer way.

I live where I am not a machine.  I am human.