Don't Do the Voice

We were at “the cumulative effect” when June told me not to do the voice.

“He doesn’t talk like that.”

“I’m reading your letter, not his.”

“You’re enjoying it.”

I was. She had asked me to read it as if I were her manager, and I had given myself a good office, a large salary and a woman outside who would prevent people from reaching me. In my own employment I was trying to persuade a man who sold garden furniture that his website needed a writer. He had asked whether I could do a sample first. June’s manager had seemed a useful person to be for half an hour.

She had brought six pages, printed on one side, in a folder with elastic corners. She said she’d used a chatbot. Now she wanted someone who had met a bad manager.

“I’ve mostly met editors.”

“That’ll do.”

The complaint concerned what had happened while she was away looking after her mother, and what continued to happen after she came back. Her desk had been given to somebody else. The contents of its drawers were in a black bag in a cupboard. For the first three mornings she sat at the little table where people left deliveries, getting up whenever a parcel arrived. Nobody had told her whether this was temporary. She had asked. The man had said they were all having to be flexible.

There were other things. Work she used to do went elsewhere. Questions about it still came to her. She was introduced to a visitor as someone who was helping them out, although she had worked there eleven years. The letter put these incidents in separate sections. Dates, witnesses, consequences. You could find your way around it. I have been paid for writing with less consideration for the reader.

The black bag bothered me. She had mentioned it once and moved on. I kept seeing a person on her knees in front of a cupboard, opening bags to discover which rubbish was hers.

“Was there actual rubbish in there?”

“No.”

“Were you there when they packed it?”

“I was with my mother.”

I had lost track of the days. They were in the letter.

I went on reading, without the voice. June watched my face. When I looked up she looked down at the page, as though she might have missed a passage that explained my expression. I began to feel the discomfort of an actor whose playwright has come to the rehearsal. There was no way to skim. If I paused, she wanted to know why.

At the end she had signed her full name. There was enough white paper beneath it for another complaint.

“What do you want them to do?” I asked.

“Something.”

“Yes, but what?”

“You tell me.”

It was a reasonable answer to give a writer, if you hadn’t employed one before.

I went back through the last page. There were things that had to cease and matters requiring a response, but nothing I could put on a little list and cross off. I could imagine a man receiving it, opening a fresh document and feeling very competent. Thank you for bringing these concerns to our attention. He might get help with his letter too. Between them they could have the correspondence of two people who owned ships.

“Do you want the desk back?”

“There’s somebody at it.”

“They could move her.”

“She hasn’t done anything.”

“All right. Another desk.”

“It isn’t about a desk.”

It was partly about a desk. I had reached the point in the afternoon when I wanted to be allowed to say something stupid without its becoming my position. June took a biscuit. She held it for a while before eating it. I had bought the cheap ones with a stripe of chocolate underneath, so you could pretend to yourself it was a plain biscuit until you turned it over.

I asked whether she wanted to leave.

She wanted to leave on Sunday evenings. By Friday she sometimes felt she could stay. There was a woman in accounts she liked. The bus stopped almost outside. Her mother’s appointments were easier to arrange now that everybody knew about them. She didn’t want to learn where the toilets were in another building. Then she said she hated the sound of the front door there, the suck and click of it closing behind her.

That hadn’t gone in the letter.

I didn’t suggest putting it in. I could already see myself making a paragraph of it, giving the door an importance which would please me and make her sound frightened. She wasn’t asking for my best work. She had brought something she could send without going red halfway through it. I had no wish to take that away from her. Besides, I liked the sections. It was a relief to encounter an accusation you could locate again after going to make tea.

But I wanted an ending. It was becoming an appetite, independent of what had happened to her. Give the woman a proper place to sit. Put her work back. Speak to the man. I could offer endings all afternoon, especially endings in which someone else had to find office space.

“An apology?”

“He apologised about the cupboard.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he was sorry if there’d been any confusion.”

“Was there?”

“I knew which cupboard he meant.”

She ate the rest of the biscuit. I laughed, and she didn’t. Then she said he had shown her to it himself. He had moved a box of paper so she could get the bag out. This seemed to trouble her more than if he’d pointed across the room and gone away. She described him holding the cupboard door while she pulled. The bag caught on something. They both waited for it to come free.

I no longer wanted to perform him. The helpful little movements were beyond me.

June asked if the letter was too long.

“For him?”

“For anybody.”

I spread the pages out. I could still find the dates. I could still find the bag. The length wasn’t what had stopped me.

“If he puts everything back on Monday,” I said, “what happens on Tuesday?”

“I go to work.”

“And is that all right?”

She rubbed a crumb out of the crease in the folder. I wondered how many versions of Monday she had already been through. I could go back to garden furniture when she left. She had to get on the bus.

“He could ask me,” she said.

“Ask you what?”

“What I’m going to be doing. How we’re going to work. Something he doesn’t already know the answer to.”

I looked for a pen. It was an old reflex. A person said something useful and I reached to make it available for later.

“No,” she said. “Leave it.”

I put the pen down.

“Finish being him.”

“I’ve read it.”

“I know. Now what do you say?”

She took the pages from me and squared them against the table. I began to explain that I couldn’t know what was possible in their office, who was responsible for which decision, whether the other woman had been promised the desk. June let me finish. Then she put the letter back in front of me and moved her chair. Until then we had been sitting side by side.

Source: ‘AI clog’: UK public bodies battle onslaught of chatbot-generated complaints