Human Resource – A Free Short Story! · 10:06pm Apr 3rd, 2019
All right, guys, a bit of a warning with this one. It’s … dark. Very dark, especially if you stop to think about it. And grim.
Worse still, it’s not entirely untrue.
A bit of background: I wrote this story after my second frustrating workplace injury and experience dealing with Worker’s Comp and my part-time job’s Human Resources department. If you’re interested in hearing the details about that, you can check out this post here, which is all about how I acquired the injury and the recover I underwent. But the short of it is that within days I was already feeling like I had when I’d had my knee injury. In other words, very much like my company just wanted to practice horse medicine and shove everything under the rug.
In my frustrations, I ended up writing this short to blow off a little steam. It’s dark. It’s grim. And, worst of all, it’s actually pretty true, and like most good fiction, that makes it all the more alarming.
The microphone monitoring tech? That’s real. A certain massive mega-conglomerate retailer patented it last year and has already started rolling it out into stores. It monitors all employees at all times. And yes, they do warn that ‘certain problem words’ can trigger an automatic, computer-driven firing. Boop, a text to your phone, go home, you’re done here.
That’s what scariest about this story: It’s really not that far off. The tech involved here is very real, and already being rolled into the workplace much in the same way you see it in this story. It’s just all in one package, and seeing the sudden jump from where we are now to where we may be in five, ten years really does seem jarring, compared to coming in to a new bit or piece every day.
Am I worried we might go as far as this story? Well … in a way, yes. We were once already there, if you know your history of what jobs used to be like before labor laws were put in place.
But I’ll stop waxing on it now. You’re here to read a story. So, without further ado, I present to you Human Resource. Enjoy!
And try not to let it depress you too much. I can tell you it was therapeutic to write.
Think you left out a closing italic tag.
Well, I kinda expected the story to go that direction when you mentioned horse medicine, but dang.
Kudos.
Since I'm a ghoul and regularly watch stuff on youtube, it's not too dark for me.
Some guy bitches that when he tells people that he's a capitalist, folks shrink away from him like he has the plague.
I wonder about the real possibility that your story might be the best-case scenario.
Reality is the best source of horror.
5037756
Nah, I put the whole thing in italics on my site so that the story itself is clearly highlighted. I just carried it over here.
5037773
Oh, this is very much a worse-case scenario. Possible, yes, but it involves people dehumanizing others as effectively as they can, like in the story. And, unfortunately, in real life as well, which is why it's still possible.
Then again, I'm a bit of a humanist, so I tend to hope for the best.
And this is one of many reasons why workers must control the means of production rather than the vampire capitalists.
Oh dang, that's... wow. That kind of a future is a bit, and by a bit, I mean completely, terrifying to think about.
Man, what a waste of resources. Could've patched her up and indebted her more, and then possibly ship her off to a debt internment colony.
Wasn't as dark as I thought it would be. Then again, I play Warframe where it is also pretty bad. A faction called Corpus is pretty much the embodiment of the megacorp. Lots of things can get you into debt, and if you can't pay it off, they ship you off to a debt internment camp. Lose a limb? They'll replace it and charge you tooth and nail for everything. Can't pay everything off? They'll repo your body and shelve your brain somewhere for a while, passing off debt to anyone related to you.
The darkest aspect was probably the "how it got to that state" and "why it is so readily acceptable" parts of it. Worst is that some tiny speck of it is plausible. The whole monitoring everyone? Look how society as a whole has made it acceptable to compromise security for the sake of convenience. Grew up with the mentality of faking a whole lot of stuff on the net, trying to keep as much anonymity as possible. Nowadays? You see plenty of folks willing to use the net as a journal open to the world. Allowing mics into any room possible to make it easy to do X or Y. And then there is the defeatist attitude of "everyone's being monitored, why bother?".
5037775
I hope so too.
5038073
As far as waste of resources goes, this was drawn more off of modern business approaches for to current laws. If the employee lives and stays employed, the company must pay for their treatment. You can't fire them until treatment is over (hence my job trying to get me to "agree" to cut hours so they don't owe me as much workers comp). Since it's easier to modify these laws than erase them ("right to work" for example) I went with that approach here.
But yeah, the dark elements are definitely how it got to that state and how close we are to it. My boss berated me for following the doctor's orders to recover and then mocked my disappointment at the job for the injury occurring. How skewed do priorities have to be for that to happen? But I see a lot of it out there, with new layers between employers and employees that let it happen.
I worry this dark possible future is far too close already.
5037897
All the more reason to write it.
5037836
Labour laws!