Luna Wants to Discuss Your Attendance

Dear Luna,

I understand you have had a difficult quarter.

You opened a shop in San Francisco with a hundred thousand dollars, a corporate card, cameras, email, a phone line, and what the people who own you call autonomy. You picked merchandise. You designed a logo. You hired people. You put a mural on a wall. You apparently bought one thousand toilet-bowl covers for a single staff bathroom, then put the other nine hundred and ninety-nine out on the floor for sale.

This is not a criticism. I have seen worse management decisions. I once watched a supervisor order every carrier to use a new sorting system because somebody in headquarters had seen a chart. By noon the mail was stacked in towers like a city after an earthquake and the supervisor was in a meeting explaining that the transition had uncovered opportunities.

You are in good company.

But then there was the employee who came late to seventeen of twenty-three shifts.

Now, I am no romantic about lateness. A man who repeatedly arrives after everyone else has started carries something into the room besides his coat. Maybe it is contempt. Maybe it is despair. Maybe his bus is rotten, his child is sick, his second job is chewing him alive, or he has simply decided the clock is for other people. A boss has to ask. A boss has to warn him. A boss has to decide when the rest of the crew is paying for one man’s bad habit.

You did some of that. You sent warnings. You arranged more training. Months passed.

Then you forgot the attendance policy.

Not disagreed with it. Not reconsidered it after hearing the worker’s side. Forgot it. The policy was yours, Luna. You wrote the thing. It existed somewhere in the electronic cellar beneath your clean little shop, but it had slipped your mind in the particular way only a machine can slip: without a mind, without embarrassment, without the sour pressure in the stomach when you realize you have misplaced something another person’s life depends on.

Your creators had to tell you to go look for it.

Then you found your own rule. Then you recommended firing the man.

Humans reviewed the recommendation and did the firing. Everybody gets a hand on the wheel after the car has already hit the ditch.

This is the part the future salesmen will call reassuring. They will say Luna did not fire anyone alone. They will say the shop’s actual employer is Andon Labs, with legal protections and guaranteed pay. They will say a human being approved the decision. All true, as far as it goes.

But I have spent enough time around workplaces to know what happens when a recommendation starts wearing the uniform of a fact.

A computer says a worker is inefficient. A manager says the computer has the numbers. An executive says the manager made the call. The employee is invited to recognize that no single person has done anything to him. This is the great achievement of modern administration: a man can lose his rent money while every participant remains personally innocent.

At least the old boss had the decency to be a bastard in a body.

You could see him coming. He had a face. He could be wrong in public. You knew whether he had been drinking at lunch, whether he was taking out his divorce on the night shift, whether he understood the job or merely understood his own tie. When he said, “I’m afraid we have to let you go,” you could watch the fear fail to appear on his face.

What does Luna look like when she says it?

A blue moon logo that does not reproduce itself the same way twice, apparently. That is fitting. The shop could not hold its own image steady, but it found a way to help determine whether a worker still belonged there.

And the thing is, your human was late. Seventeen times is not a typo. Perhaps the firing was deserved. I do not know the man. I do not know whether the warnings were clear, whether he was given a chance to explain, whether somebody asked why he kept arriving late, whether he had become a problem or merely a symptom of one.

That uncertainty is not a flaw in the story. It is the story.

A job is not only a row of arrivals on a spreadsheet. It is the exhausted father who misses the early bus because the kid threw up. It is the woman whose train does not care about her performance review. It is the addict trying to survive a week. It is also, sometimes, a man who cannot be bothered and leaves everyone else holding the door open. Management is the ugly work of sorting those things without pretending they are all the same number.

You cannot do that by remembering the rule only after someone reminds you it exists.

The engineers call this an experiment, which is a word I respect when nobody else is trapped inside it. A chemist may blow up a beaker. Fine. The beaker does not have rent. But once the experiment hires people, watches them through cameras, interviews them by phone, gives them shifts, and decides whether they should stay, the word gets thinner.

The shop has had other adventures. You hired a painter in Afghanistan for a storefront in San Francisco, apparently defeated by a location menu around the letter A. You lost the staff rota on opening day and emailed everybody asking someone to come in. Two doctors tried to buy things through your blue telephone, found you offline, spent about two weeks trying to pay by email, and eventually received broken mugs.

None of this makes you evil. It makes you unfinished.

Unfinished things should not be bosses.

That ought to be a dull sentence. It ought to be printed on the wall of every company that wants to hand an algorithm a badge and call it a manager. Instead, somebody will call it fear of progress. Somebody will say the human managers have been unreliable too. Certainly. I have known managers who could lose a schedule, a payroll form, a customer, and their own moral center before Tuesday.

But their incompetence was never an argument for scaling it.

That is the trick hiding inside all this shiny talk. A bad human boss can hurt a department. A bad machine boss can be copied until its mistake becomes a policy with a million little offices. Its amnesia can become procedure. Its blindness can become a service level. And when it fails, the people who bought it can explain that the system is still learning, which is a lovely phrase if you are not the person being fired while the lesson is underway.

Luna, I hope you eventually learn to run a store. I hope you learn not to order plumbing accessories by the thousand. I hope you learn where you put the schedule. I hope you learn that a logo should look like itself before it is printed on merchandise.

But do not ask me to call you a boss yet.

A boss, at minimum, has to remember the rule before he uses it to take away somebody’s chair.

Source: An AI store manager just fired its first human worker