Code Red

'This is your God,' said Janine, a large woman in a suggestive outfit several sizes too small for her and whose tongue probed the edges of her mouth as she spoke.

'What, this spreadsheet?' asked Sadia, stashing her notebook deep inside her bag.

'Yes,' snapped her Team Leader, breasts looming large as she leant over and tapped her biro against the flatscreen. 'Just do everything it tells you and you'll be fine.'

But Sadia wasn't convinced. The tracker for My Adherence stretched out so far, she had to scroll right twice to reach the end of it and her instant impression was it felt imposing. Impossible even. Perhaps that was the idea.

The screen itself consisted of two bars ran along on top of the other, the top a bright and luminescent green and interspersed with orange blocks at regular intervals like Flemish house bricks. These were her rest breaks and she was due there each day. The pattern changed every 24 hours apparently, but regardless, the name of the game was always the same.

'Remember,' said Janine, 'your own bar beneath records your activity in real time. Don't let your own work miss the outline by any less than eighty-five per cent, otherwise you're out of job. OK?' Janine gave a forced smile and then turned, leaving Sadia to deal with the sickly cloud of cheap perfume that hung in her wake. It masked something more sinister, but Sadia found she didn't want to think about it. Not yet, anyway. 

Green, she said to herself as she stared back at her daughter on her phone's lockscreen, then put that safely inside her bag as well, alongside her notebook. If I always keep My Adherence on green, everything will be alright. It's not a writing job, but it doesn't need to be. She thought of Maya again, then hit the call button on the software's interface and started taking calls.

For the most part, it was fairly straightforward, but every time she was asked a question that she hadn't been briefed on in training, which was often, Sadia would then have to put the caller on hold, which then resulted in her lovely green pattern turning a deathly shade of blue. The result of that would then see Janine stand up and perform a series of passive aggressive body shapes in her direction.

Four hours passed like this, a war of two colours fought amidst a sea of words, but just as Sadia was beginning to feel her spirit break, My Adherence informed her it would soon be lunch. If I can just keep myself conscious, she thought, I might be able to stick this one out.

'It's your lunch,' said Janine as she ran back from the toilet, ruffled and slightly breathless. One of Sadia's colleagues, Jez, who normally looked half asleep at his desk, was also returning to his chair from the same direction. His hair was ruffled. The pair exchanged a furtive look before Janine shouted up like nothing had just happened. 'Take it, take it!' She shouted at Sadia, then pointed at her wrist watch. 'You're required by law you know...health and safety!'

Sadia stabbed with her forefinger at her handset but the damn thing wouldn't turn off. The software was frozen which had sent My Adherence into a code red. Now Sadia was getting what she had spent all morning trying to avoid; a rich seam of crimson ruining her percentages.

'You need to sort that out,' said Janine, pointing at Sadia's screen with her feet wide apart.

'I know, I--'. Eventually, Sadia managed to switch the code over to the correct shade of yellow, but then felt a twinge in her bladder as she remembered she'd forgot to select the correct code.

Janine watched on with disgust as Sadia changed the colour back to purple, then reminded her she was two minutes into her rest break already.

After the toilet there were twenty two minutes left so she heated up her tupperware and ate her pesto in silence whilst the twenty four news channel played back and did the same. There was no-one in the canteen " lunchtimes were individually staggered to make sure most employees ate alone " so she had time to reflect. In the end, however, all she could think about was how, after a morning dominated by colours, now she was away from her desk, she could only see was surrounded by grey and beige walls and metal kitchen units. The only colour of any note belonged to the crisp packets in the vending machine.

The afternoon went well enough, but just before she was due her break, a call came through and Janine hissed through gritted teeth that she would have to take it.

'I've been told that my bin is contaminated,' said a woman, from the sounds of it reasonably educated and in her mid-thirties. 'Could I have a new one please?'

'Sure, ma'am.' Normally Sadia would have asked more testing questions, but she was on a code red. 'May I take your postcode please?'

The caller sighed heavily down the phone. 'Look, I've just moved in.'

'We need a postcode to process the call.'

'Oh, alright!' shouted the woman, as though it was everything but. 'I'm going to have to get a letter, wait there!'

On and on went the code red, but Sadia couldn't hang up. It had been made one of the commandments in her training; unless someone was swearing at her, she had to sit there and let them finish whatever it was they were doing. Fob them off ideally, but she hadn't yet mastered the art and so all she could do was fidget in her seat as she watched the red mark continue to drain her score. Eighty seven per cent soon became eighty six.

'It's just the way it works around here,' said Janine, noticing Sadia's frustration but way too deep in the middle of a sext to bother stepping in. 'It's how we keep you keen.'

How to fly in such a culture, Sadia thought later, before realizing that like a t**d, you could only ever float.

In the dying minutes of her shift, Janine had given her a staff orientation questionnaire to fill in on a tea-stained tablet and now Sadia was enjoying the chance to be creative with her words. 'When you have to use passwords like 'Bosses69', she wrote under the section that asked for feedback, 'you realise you aren't part of a professional collective here, and that any success you do have depends on your ability to meld into the inefficiency of the system. That's trying to tear out your soul,' she added before deleting.

She then tried to block out the sight of Janine butt as she paraded up and down the corridor, presumably for Jez's benefit, but it was no use, he was too busy on the phone.

'Learn how to be a machine' Sadia wrote under question 39 (how do you plan to enhance your future prospects) and then watched on as an icon performed a little animation to indicate her data had been successfully dispatched.

It'll matter little in the grand scheme of things, she said to herself as she walked back to her desk, and in the end, it turned out that she was right. The questionnaire's algorithm had been programmed to spot offensive words and hate-speech but no flags were ever raised for complaints against authority. And that made Sadia laugh, because she realized she was speaking a language no-one could read any more. Or could read, but no longer saw any point in trying to understand.

Author's Note

Any feedback welcome