The system or you

Patricia gets up at 5 in the morning, Monday through Friday, to make it before 8 to her job at a call center. She sits down at her workstation, turns on her computer, puts on the headset with earphones and microphone, and connects to the system.

For the next 8 hours a system will tell her whom to call, what to say, how to respond to each situation.

One day Patricia calls me. I take the call, and my answer throws her off a bit: “yes, tell the CEO of xxxx that I am aware he can’t sleep because I fell behind on my payments”.

I often think the person calling me is just an extension of a system, a drone, part of a machine that doesn’t know me and doesn’t care about my problems, or about why I fell behind on a payment. He just repeats what the system tells him to say.

There are many people who, if you pull them away from what the system tells them, don’t know how to react. They haven’t realized they have turned into Borg, into part of a strange collective that has assimilated them.

It’s what happens when you call a customer support number: you run into the most powerless drone of all, the one who is there so you won’t interrupt the workings of the machine. The one who is incapable of solving your problem, because he was chosen not to give you a solution, beyond the predefined ones on his screen.

That’s how you come to realize that a lot of people work by and for the system.

Resistance is futile.

Systems cannot dominate or replace human judgment. When that happens, when there are no exceptions, when there is no flexibility, the system has become something oppressive, for its users and for everyone affected by the decisions the system makes.

I remember the case of Stanislav Petrov, a man who, having designed it himself, refused to obey his system’s orders, and by doing so saved us all from destruction.

How much of the blame for the crises is ours, simply for following the dictates of the system and no longer making decisions as humans?