Tevun-Krus #100

70 - The Happiest Employee at Sammy's - @theidiotmachine - Dystopian

The Happiest Employee at Sammy's

By theidiotmachine

Sammy was a man most muscular

Who made pancakes both tasty and circular

He held up his spoon

By the light of the moon

And his muscly crepes were crepuscular!

Sammy's Crepuscular Crepes company poem

In that morning's Daily Care Stand Up meeting, sitting on a flimsy plastic chair in a windowless room, the thing that I said I was most looking forward to was being criticised again by the same customer who had given me constructive feedback yesterday.

'Because Sammy says through feedback, we all grow,' I said.

The Happiness app gave a thumbs up. If I still cared, I would have been happy to get my dollar bonus for that meeting.

I spent the morning running remote diagnostics on crepe machines across a dozen cities, fixing the broken devices when I could and dispatching engineers on the ground when I couldn't. I kept up with my quotas, even managed to get something working when the expert system had given up. Then, I dealt with the angry customer, some guy who screamed and vented into his microphone, spitting profanities and hate. I just looked contrite and apologised at the appropriate points; and then I pressed a button that let the guy have a dozen free crepes. I didn't care.

At the end of it, I stretched, and walked from my cubicle to the water cooler. Iris was waiting.

She smiled at me, a splinter of honesty between a perfectly pressed Sammy's uniform and dark hair that reflected the strip lights. She handed me a cup of water, and we sat in the rest area together, the cheap orange fabric of the chairs stained with endless coffee and false optimism.

'How's it going?', she asked.

'I'm having a great day,' I replied. 'How about you?'

Because our conversations were recorded and assessed for positivity, we were limited in what we could say. The Official Sammy's Employee Happiness app on our phones monitored everything we did, because a happy employee is a productive employee. But, some time ago, Iris had bought a burner phone, and pressed a scrap of paper with the number on it into my palm. And so, surreptitiously, we had devised a code that we could use in the office.

'I think I might make double my quota today,' she said. That meant, I have had enough of this shit.

I smiled and nodded. I didn't have a way of saying this in code, so I just came out and said it.

'I've had something big happen today. I think it's going to be great.'

She raised an eyebrow.

'I'm so excited! Tell me more!'

'Of course! But first, what's your Sammy's career goal, Iris?'

Iris was in accounting. She wrangled the algorithms that moved money around in the most efficient way possible, minimising the company's liabilities and maximising its profits. We had first met when I'd submitted an idea about optimising a tiny part of the crepe machines; she'd read the proposal, realised it would improve the lifetime of the machines by a few percent, and approved it. That was two years ago. Nothing had come of it, although there had been two steering committees and a working group created to look at it.