Aegri Somnia

I nod once and go back to my desk.

I don’t even know why I tried in the first place. Open the first folder, find row 385, and click on it. Thousands of lines flow on the screen, inside my cornea. Confessions and sins that belong to the forgotten times and forgotten people.

They don’t even know we train a set of deep learning systems on the dirty laundry they laid bare on the confession websites back in the 2000s, confident that they’d remain anonymous forever.

Select the line titled “Mothers and Sons”.

I do it every day. My team was told to “spot complex emotional patterns unfolding between a mother and her son and classify the resultant interplay of dominance and submission” in those confession blogs. Can’t AI do it itself? No. “Our models have been originally designed to learn and adapt to the given data points. While a redesign can enhance the recognizing and classifying capabilities of the models, our real-time simulations show that any such benefits arising from the proposed redesign will fail to compensate for the irreplaceable contributions of human input, which we prioritize as a matter of corporate best practice. Moreover, as the demand for cutting-edge technologies and applications continues to steadily rise, we have to take the cost-efficient methods into account as the leading language model training service.”

Shortly put: Shut up and go back to work. That’s the crap they e-mail to us whenever someone “fails to resist complaining”. The new ones lose their nerves quickly. We got used to it. We had to.

“when i was a kid, i and one of my friends used to steal dvds from a store. we’d rip the barcodes off and stuff our bags with, i don’t know, maybe ten or fifteen dvds? we’d sneak in every goddamn day and the bozo behind the counter never digged a shit. but one day we got caught…”

I don’t need to read the rest of it. Drag the box to the “Reclassify” folder.

When you spend eight hours of the day reading and classifying hundreds of little confessions, like it or not, you begin to recognize the nicknames, too. Like that “lag2000”, the pervert who said he liked to watch his girl students. Or “icecreamgirl”, a woman who had to walk into the room wearing only her underwear to force her mother-in-law to leave the house.

We read every kind of stuff. We try not to think about them much when we’re alone. “We’re committed to ensuring the well-being of our employees. To that end, we established “Mental Health First” consultation units within the same building and provide on-site assessments…” Blah, blah, blah. The new ones fall for that quickly. We forgot what even mental health support means. We had to.

It’s still 2 PM. I’ve been checking my watch for the last fifteen minutes. The time stops here. You never remember when you logged in, and when you do, it’s usually the time to log out.

Another confession. This time it’s from a married woman. Husband was away. Let’s look if she had a son. And, yeah, there he is. “Sometimes you miss the…” Fuck you. Okay, enough, send it to the “Classified” folder. God knows what filth this folder is brimming with. What kind of a mother are you?

I hate this job. We all do. The new ones are more enthusiastic. They haven’t seen the worst yet. They’re still proud of being predators chasing old preys.

The lunch break was two hours ago, but I still feel hungry. I briefly look away from the screen, and my eyes search for anyone snacking secretly when they think the Inspector isn’t looking. I see Sarah. She’s typing away something on her computer. But our job is to click, read, and drag. We don’t write anything. She probably found something interesting and now shares it on her Instagram. That’s illegal. I should report her. But what about all those colleagues who love to talk about what they read this morning during coffee breaks? Don’t people talk about the confessions with their families? Am I not writing it all right now?

The Inspector is back. I’m still hungry. My eyes are aching. Open a new folder, find row 112, and click on the first box. “Hello, I’m living in a small village…”

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