System X Cares

System X would like to welcome you to your day at the regional office Adam. Today is June 14th Adam and you have 8 new job tasks in your in box. As part of our 'System X Cares' program, we request that you take twenty two point five minutes per in-box task and two point five minutes to rejuvenate between tasks.

Adam had been greeted in this manner every working day for 5 years now. His keyboard monitored his activity in both activity and content. System X mandated he perform in excess of 10 tasks daily, which equated to over 2,500 tasks per year and in excess of 12,500 tasks in the 5 years he was employed there.

Nobody talked to each other in the office unless it was related to some task or another. So, when the 'System X Cares' program started, it was regarded as yet another irrelevance. Management had to aggregate their report's tasks as part of their duties, such that a manager with 8 reports would have to deliver 20,000 tasks per year. At the top of this structure was a CEO who effectively undertook to deliver three quarters of a million tasks per financial year, which everyone believed would keep the stock price stable and the company afloat.

Most people in the regional office muted this daily greeting. Some allowed it to start the day through unworn headphones, and then there was one or two staff who would allow the greeting to play through their speakers as a form of sanguine submission.

Today being June the 14th was another day where Adam walked in and sat down under the ambience of droning fans. They were almost like a tinnitus with which he had learned to live with. He thought about the phrase 'System X Cares'. Did they? Did System X care that Mildred in accounts had cancer? Did System X care the Shane in engineering couldn't afford supervision for his teenage children while he worked, and as a result they were out of control? Did System X care that a majority of their staff older that their twenties were on medication for the rest of their lives? Who was this System X such that they could embody care? And to whom?

When Adam heard the words 'System X Cares' today, his heart sank and then a switch flicked. System X was the cul-de-sac of all his dreams, and he was going to let them know (whoever 'they' were) that nobody believed their mantra.

He took out his phone and turned on the voice recorder and replayed his morning greeting into the device. That night, he sat down with his home studio and transferred the recording onto the console. Through a copy and paste process he created an mp3 that repeated the words 'System X Cares', slowly and quietly. After a while, the loop got louder and quicker until it got to the point of a piercing screech. And then it went quiet. He put this on a USB stick.

The next morning, he went into work and he searched the network for the recording of the words 'System X Cares' and replaced it with his recording.

As people started to come in for work, headsets around the offices were making distressing noises. Anyone who had their headsets on, threw them off wondering if their computers had become corrupted. When the message was played on anyone's speakers, staff looked at each other with bemused faces. Conversations started.

The IT department hadn't seen anything untoward on the system, so they assumed the network was under a cyber-attack. The issue couldn't but escalate to the CEO as he too heard the warped rendition of the company mantra. IT couldn't get to the root of the issue and so declared that all systems needed to be quarantined. An email went around the company.

Adam read his,

Dear Adam,

Due to an issue with the System X Cares system, we have had to take our network offline. We understand that some staff may have been upset by the corrupted message so we would ask that you take the rest of the day off on full pay and check your System X email this evening to see if the System X Cares system has been restored to operational status.

We thank you for your understanding with this.

Adam wondered, "Maybe they do care?"