MINDLYFT (COMPLETE)

CHAPTER 6

I thought back to my own experiences at the office. My start with the AlgoBosses. The harassing text messages, the voices through my ThinkingCap, the distortions to my vision, overlaid with directives and distractions. Telling me I had to get to work. To earn more money. Telling me I had to spend money to make money. It was coming from all directions and started to invade my dreams. I was drinking a pot of coffee every morning and then taking UpJolts through the Cap to stay focused, working eighteen hours a day.

The Algo would wake me up at four in the morning, offering a high-priced gig across town, doing a chore for a bigwig. He needed someone to pet his dog while he was out for a few hours. Easy only the dog was vicious. Didn't like strangers or anyone for that matter. I got bit on the hand and spent the next four hours in the emergency room. The AlgoBoss penalized me for being unavailable and then made me pay a fine or accept a low-pay gig for the next five hours. I took the gig, which amounted to loading boxes off a drone and carrying them into a warehouse. The Auto-lifters weren't working on account of a solar storm.

Sometimes I got one or two hour gigs greeting people in front of restaurants or watching an empty street for vagrants, but normally the gigs were all over town and cost me almost as much as they paid. One by one, I racked up office work, programming jobs, human interface problem solving, and other human interaction and social lubricant gigs, until my QualPoints were enough for a permanent office role. It took two years but I finally thought I'd made it.

I was working at a MoneyTech firm. Product Development, Enhancement and Customer Satisfaction. Which basically meant finding new ways to separate people from their money. We'd analyze existing products and think up ways to tweak them. Make them more confusing, infuse them with tricks, and figure out how to add fees based on human behaviors that customers were unlikely to change. Or were unable to change. Sometimes we'd invent a new product entirely and sometimes we'd spend whole days talking our higher profile customers, we'd call Clients, down from a ledge. Convince them that we weren't really ripping them off. That they were getting true value for our services. Then we'd give them a discount to make them feel better about it. Then sell them a cross-service that cost even more than the original product.

Our products included ThinkingCap augmented reality overlays where an AutoFinance Advisor appears in front of you throughout the day to advise you on financial decisions. Tells you when you're overspending and offers alternative suggestions on where to find certain products cheaper. For a week or two most of our customers find this very helpful. It even saves them considerable amounts of money. But once the Advisor gains enough trust, which it records through a special brainwave measuring app imbedded in the product, it starts pushing products the customer never thought to purchase. It needles them, overlays subliminal adds through augmented visuals, and otherwise prods them to try new services. Of course the Advisor knows how to get these products at steep discounts. When one method doesn't work it continues to try others until its unlocked the customers' psychology. It will use their social network peers, it will shame them, it will trick them into buying something they didn't realize they were buying, but in the end, the customer always spends more money than they were spending before.

Most of our product ideas were generated by AutoThought databases. Our jobs consisted mainly of debating the merits and drawbacks of products, outlining the human elements of what we thought might work, conducting surveys and focus groups with customers, and allaying the concerns, fears and complaints of our customer base. And of all these roles we played, the most important role of all was becoming the most favored employee of the Boss. And if not that, then the most favored peer of whichever employee was the most favored. It was an ongoing game of UpKiss, only everyone had the same application for this, so the real challenge was being original. Most of the other nodes in the office were so plugged into their Caps that wasn't so easy for them, but that was where I excelled.