D Done 1.4 Harold is replaced by a chatbot

Harold inherited some money when his mother passed away, used it to buy a wedding photography business that, at least on the books had been around for 20 years. They told him about their repeat customers, children they had shot bringing their children for portraits, but they didn't tell him it was happening less and less. He soon learned he was in a changing industry. Amateurs were stepping up to shoot more weddings. And the stakes were low, everyone with a smart phone can shoot, somebody would have great pictures to share on social media. And now, the packaged albums, the popularity and accessibility of digital photography, and changes in the stock-photo market.

He soon realized he needed a job. While scanning jobs websites one day, he saw the ad, "International BPO". A call center job at a BPO (a business process outsourcing company)  is getting rare, US prisons in Dublin CA and Morgantown WV have a huge footprint on the market. But it’s still a job and one right in Everett. There was contact data at the bottom, Pittsburg area code, he called.

The voice on the other end simply said, "HR”. He tried to introduce himself. No interest, told him to expect a text message after the call, and to follow the instructions. The text, from a Houston exchange invited him to an interview at a recruitment meeting at the Best Western Navigator Plus, where he was supposed to hand over the code at the bottom of the message.

The next morning, Harold went to the address. There was a long line of chairs along the wall with a desk at the end. A woman was sitting at the desk talking on her smartphone. Harold waited patiently standing a respectful distance from the desk, after a few minutes, she looked up, asked to see his code, gave him a number. He went and sat down, after an hour his number was called and he went into a small conference room.

The interviewer asked how much success mattered to him. Harold was taken aback, success at a call center?  She didn't seem satisfied and said as much, but she was going to offer him a job anyway.

She gave him a slip of paper confirming employment as a Customer Care Executive and the address. The slip did not state the name of the organization. The next morning he showed up to an industrial park, the center was in a converted warehouse, concrete floors, partition city.

They had a room set up to train new employees. He met his trainer who taught him what to say when he answered the phone and handed him a printed card in case he forgot. When a customer called there were three ways to look up their records, in order of preference: phone number, address, name. Names are dangerous because of duplication, which John Smith is this anyway?

On the way back from his training session, he saw the managers in some sort of religious ceremony. They were bowing to a picture of Ajit Pai standing in front of an American flag.

Almost all the calls were from unhappy customers. The company was in business to sell connectivity packages, phone, Internet, TV streaming movies, even alarm systems. Each package was for 3 years and could easily cost hundreds per month. People that lost their jobs, people that realized they weren't using this or that, people that said the salesperson told them this or that. Every day Harold went to work, a month, two. Bit by bit he got better at not helping people.

From time to time there were no calls, during one of the interludes he asked the lady in the next partition about the picture. He made our company possible, she said. Net Neutrality, we don't make anything, or do anything, we just sell packages.

Then one Friday, everyone was called to a stand up meeting, pink slipped, two weeks severance, the call center operation was being taken over by an AI that had mastered the art of patiently listening while never offering to eliminate or reduce any packages. On average, every call to a person at a call enter cost the communications company $20 to process. With the AI, the cost was less than $1.