Hate The Voice

An Extract From: Let Helen Like Snow

The repeating aisles of the warehouse are spectacularly linear, giving the illusion of a vastly nested square, two mirrors held parallel to one another, with an infinite repetition stretching out to the far reaches of the iron-clad structure. Everyone acknowledges the sheer scale of the place upon their first entry. It is impossible not to, with the great orange beams holding up the racking, smaller and smaller to the naked eye as they stretch further away into the distance, into the amber fog of the forklift strewn ribcage. The relentless beeping of lugged machinery provided chorus to the motion-detector lights that would turn on, horror movie-esque as you drove down the Monstro whale stomach of scattered cardboard and polystyrene. In all, the warehouse measured nearly a half mile in length, comfortably large enough to house a fleet of 747s, or around 50 football pitches. The place hummed with batteries and the coming and going of trucks. Unquestionably twentyfourseven, with the merciless expectation that it should remain so. Lorries would appear around the clock, docked up to the gills of the beast’s exterior, and under absolutely no circumstances should they sit there for more than two hours; dribbling valuable petrol and exhaust fumes, under the boot-stamp of required ant-like efficiency, which was a total non-negotiable. Technology ruled the roost. Systems: synchronised and succinct and perfect and optimised. If the computer said no, the answer was no. A spectacle of modern capability, played out on a chess board larger than most small towns within the surrounding ten mile radius. Staff came and went unnoticed, as this great distributive conurbation chugged its pistons to the tune of a million rampant horses, unbolted as they charged with metronomic precision, to the dance and jive of the Motherboard, whom they obeyed with an undying mechanical exactitude.

Yellow team, B Shift: Operating between the aisles of BA and CR. Tasked with picking duties and forklift operation, with very occasional container loading/unloading. Minimum performance speed is 95%. This is not open for debate. Any prolonged period of low performance, and you have a problem. Managers have performance quotas too, you know. It’s definitely not personal, nothing here is. Performance, performance, performance; it’s the beating heart of this place and the rhythm you have to subscribe to. Round the clock, every day. Performance, performance, performance. Tune your strings to its demands. Surf its waves until the shore. Performance. Carry it in your hands. Performance. Never drop it. 95%, 95%, ninety, five, percent. Monday, through to Friday: 95%. Performance, performance, performance.

Your performance is judged by how fast you scan items. That’s really all it boils down to. Idle time is duly noted, and this does include toilet breaks. So you’ve gotta know the game. But of course there’s loopholes, and unless you want to drive home each day clutching your steering wheel with calloused hands and chronic neck pain, you’re gonna want to know ‘em.

First of all, your scanner. Learn the interface. The WM3913, colloquially known as WSDs (Wrist Scanning Devices). It straps to your wrist, and on the arm mounted screen sits your next location, your picking target, your performance. And now, they come equipped with an AI automated ‘assistant’ feature. The Voice. Wrap the button around your forefinger, and press it with your thumb. This is your scanner. This is your brain. Learn to hate the automated voice. Learn to despise it and learn to resent it. Dream of suffocating its vapid inflective tones, and fantasise choking its Big Brother-style demands. This voice is your enemy, and you must never mistake its optimistic cadence for any form of camaraderie. To the voice, you are dehumanised, you are streamlined, you are the warehouse. To the voice, you are your job. You are the tool. You are the number on the great big computer screen, which stares down from its oracular tower, spotlighting you as your pixel moves along like a chip on a board game table. To the voice, you are the production catalyst, the chimney it will use to carry forth its bitter smoke, rising into the air and sooting the inner pipes of your very being with the grime of its incessancy. Never mistake the voice as anything other than your enemy. It is not one of you, and you are not one of it. That would be your first mistake. Never forget that.

Another key lesson: it’s essentially impossible to hit performance through honesty. Most people start off honest in a place like this, go in with a ‘keep your head down and crack on’ kinda attitude. Well, try breaking your back everyday for your first month, relieved at having finally found work, sweat running down your face as you try to impress your new employers, just to earn enough to feed your kids and pay your mortgage. Then seeing 81%, 76%, 68%. Then the manager calls you in. Says you ‘ain’t workin’ fast enough’, got to keep ‘their eye on you’. Then The Voice is in your ear all day, automated, ignorant, insistent. But what does The Voice know about you? Your life? Your kids? Your dreams? Your daughter who gets bullied at school real bad, how she comes home with bruises all up her arms and dried tear marks on her cheeks, and how you’re just tryna earn a living so you can take her for a nice day out from time to time. But the parasitic Voice, it’s in your ear again, yapping at you to ‘go faster’, ‘hurry up’, put ‘yer’ back into it’, as the bags under your eyes extend and the hairs on your head start to grey. Suddenly you’ve been there a year, two years, five years, ten. Performance. Beating down on you like a vulture pecking your scabbed head. Performance. Of course you’re gonna make the most of any loophole that comes about; and you’d be a fool not to. Performance, and you look back at what you had. 95%. Ninety five percent. Honesty cooks here like a pig in a barn fire. Performance. Honesty makes you easy prey. Performance, performance, performance. The Voice cuddles you and says ‘good job’. But you look back and see its shit dripping off the pavement curbs of your so-called aspirations, so you look ahead, down the path of your remaining dreams, but The Voice kicks you off-road and makes you walk in the gutter of your wailing mundanity. Performance! Performance! Performance!

So you spit in the face of your killer, as it suffocates you with its collar of gratitude. Whilst the images spin around the fixed centre, and you find yourself once again obsessing over artifical light.

HATE THE VOICE.

HATE THE VOICE.

HATE THE VOICE.

Because the voice hates you,

And don’t you forget it.