We used to punch a clock, you know. Do you kids even know what that means anymore? We got to work, went inside, and in the hallway or break room there would be a clock on the wall with little cards sticking out of slots on the side. We’d look for the card with our worker number on it, pull it out and then slide it into another slot in the front of the clock. It would make this chunk! noise– the noise meant that the clock recorded the time we started working. Then we put the card back in its spot.
We would have to do that when we took a break and also before we left for the day. Chunk! It was all just to make sure we were accounted for and got paid out correctly. The bosses were strict about it. I think we called it “punching a clock” because that’s what I wanted to do to it sometimes, haha! But you kids probably have another term for it by now. What do you call that?
I still imagine hearing that noise sometimes.
It was a fine job. I mean, I worked there for– what– forty-two years. I liked the place. I made a lot of friends there, friends I still have even today! I liked all of my bosses. Well, most of my bosses. A couple of them were jerks. I think I remember them the most. They were the kind of boss who didn’t really care about anything but how many units you finished. Or didn’t finish, I guess. We didn’t like them very much and I don’t suppose they liked us either. They probably thought we were slow on purpose just to make them look bad. It wasn’t that way at all, but those jerks believed what they wanted to believe.
It’s just that some parts of the job were hard and not all of us could work as fast as everyone else. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, that’s just how it was. At some point they would look at how much we were producing and if it wasn’t enough, it was bad news.
I remember one year my team had done really well, like we broke production records across the whole company. We finished almost twice the amount of units as the second-place assembly team, and they were good. But the team I worked with at the time– we could crank ‘em out. So we got first place; our worker numbers were engraved on a new plaque. We got mentioned on the front section in the bulletin, congratulations from the bosses and the chiefs. That kind of stuff. It was nice. We were famous for a bit, haha! But I guess someone figured that since the team did so well that year, we would do it again the next year.
So we got a new boss.
No clue what really happened. The old boss just didn’t punch the clock one day. There was no announcement. And the new one was different– we could tell right away even before we had our next production meeting. I mean, you know this already but the quickest way to identify a boss is by their gamma shield integrity signature. It needs to fall within a certain detectable range to be able to support most organic mod functionalities. ‘Cause a brain isn’t gonna power itself! Not yet, anyway. Same with average ambient subsurface temperature, since the differentials in the heat sink arrays on a couple of exoskel layers depend on the gen variant. Well, with a few exceptions. Plus it didn’t matter how long we’d been working there– way back in 2114 we all received the ion sensor installation mandate so we knew when a boss was coming. Especially since we tuned ours to max trigger radius. I think everyone did that, haha. And of course the room got a little colder if one of ‘em came in. Those arrays are something else, aren’t they?
But this boss, whew– their gamma sig was way beyond what I’d seen before. Ambient temp was so low I couldn’t believe it at first, but the frost on the office windows told me the truth. I’d read about those variants in the general bulletin but I didn’t think I’d ever work for one. The boss was friendly enough but we knew it was really because the chiefs higher up wanted us to finish more units.
It was never something we could’ve maintained for long. The targets were too high. At first we just continued what we’d been doing, but no one on the team was surprised when the anomalies started popping up. Because obviously we got routine mech inspections. Turned out a lot of us had to get retinas replaced way sooner than the timetable recommended for our model, but they told us it was all within spec. And likewise for some fine motor phalangeal implant failures that we blamed on higher assembly throughput. That causes a lot of wear. But I’m talking about neuro anomalies.
Sometimes, when you’re finishing a unit, you recognize the unit. Usually it was someone you had worked with before, or maybe they had been on another team. Occasionally it was even a boss– those units were always a challenge to reconfigure since their cybernetic components are much more integrated into the organics. But sometimes you didn’t recognize them from work. Early on I remember finishing a couple of units I’d seen outside; I think they’d been terraformers. What I recall most is that they had similar expressions on their faces– what was left of the organic sections, anyway. I couldn’t identify the expression but I knew I’d never made it before with my own face. And right away I felt something wrong so I reported to neuro bay, and they diagnosed an anomaly.
They fixed it pretty quick and I felt better, and it wasn’t long before I was back on the line. But remember– we’d been put on an accelerated assembly protocol. So neuro anomalies happened more frequently, to more of us. We’d go to neuro bay, get diagnosed, fixed and sent back to assembly. Some of my team members went to neuro bay several times a week, and eventually they weren’t on the team any more. They ended up being deconfigured. Most cybernetic components can be repurposed. I don’t know what happens to the organics though.
You probably guessed that we failed the target objective. By the middle of that year, half of my team had been deconfigured from having too many neuro anomalies, and the ones who were left, including me, had gotten so many component upgrades that we were redirected to work teams in other initiative groups to take advantage of our higher efficiency rates.
I work in organic analytics now, as a boss. I know, I can’t quite believe that either, haha. We still haven’t discovered why some units– usually the earlier-gen drone variants with a higher organic-to-cybernetic component ratio– make certain facial expressions. We think it may depend somewhat on the work they do, as some neuro anomalies are more prevalent in certain initiative groups– like assembly as opposed to terraforming. I suppose once we discover that answer, then we’ll be a step closer to becoming an even better society.
But please excuse me, I need to go punch the clock. And you never answered my question– what do you kids call it nowadays?