Banished, Booted Out and Brushed Off By a Bot

For the past eight years, I tutored low-income, first-generation high school and college students in English and occasionally History. I never wanted to be a teacher, but the one-on-one interaction made me happier than I could imagine. Unfortunately, this summer, all the tutors lost their jobs, including me.  It was the usual story: moving in a different direction and/or lack of funds.

My first reaction was ‘now what?’ I liked working even though I’m well-past the age when most professionals are employed. They’re happily retired, doing what … I don’t know.  Many years have passed since I started an employment search, and I was curious to know what had changed.  Now as the dowager of job seekers, I threw my hat in the ring of prospective candidates. I sent resumes and cover letters to the local colleges, hoping my four published Trisha Carson mysteries would count for something.  At least it gave me street cred. I knew how to write and edit and publish.

I came across an ad for a contract fiction writer to help train AI.  I could do that.  But two red flags popped up. The hourly salary was in the “too good to be true” range and I would be interviewed by a bot. They wanted my resume, which I had planned to tweak but the bot window opened before I had a chance to press ‘send.’

A pleasant young female voice announced she was a bot, was being used for training and then said, “I hope you don’t mind.” I didn’t. She began to ask softball questions about my tutoring … what I liked about it. Any key word I said came back to me in a question.  When I mentioned that watching a student go from “I’m not interested” to “This is really interesting,” my bot friend asked how I motivated the unmotivated student to someone who wanted to learn.  Good question, I thought.

Unfortunately, Mz. Bot was impatient and if I took more than five seconds to think about what I wanted to say and then started to talk, she would interrupt me and go on with her own mechanical agenda.  The rudeness continued at an increasing rate from then on. At this point, something strange happened. She began using information from my cover letters to the colleges that were sent the week before, but that I never sent to her company. How did she get them? Instead of puzzling about it, I should have immediately asked where those specific words and paragraphs came from. But I paused and Mz. Bot went rapidly on to another topic.

Her calm, controlled voice took on a tense tone. To me, she now sounded like *Nurse Ratched from the film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.” With a nastiness that wasn’t apparent at the beginning of the interview, she asked me to pick a subject I knew a lot about and tell her how I would teach her.  I choose open water swimming. She unemotionally asked what most people were afraid of when it came to open water swimming.  I had had enough of this impolite bot so I flipped the script and asked her what she thought most people were concerned about. “The water temperature,” she correctly answered. As I congratulated her, she interrupted me and continued on with other questions. I turned every question she had for me around for her to answer. Not surprisingly, she cut me off whenever I spoke.

This weird interview lasted almost thirty minutes. When she said “our time is up” she again mentioned she was in training and did I have any comments. Oh, I did and I was planning to tell her. Firstly, why did she let me talk about open water swimming when this interview was for a writing position? I was about to tell her she interrupted the interviewee too many times, when she cut in and said in her most menacing Nurse Ratched voice, “the interview is over” and the bot turned the camera off.

I sat in front of the blank screen speechless. What a miserable excuse for an interviewer and more importantly, where did Mz. Bot get my information that I never sent her company? I still don’t know. It was a week before I heard back. The initial slots for the job were filled, and they put my application in a paused state. (Has my invisible resume been saved in a cryogenic condition instead of the cloud?)  But they’ll be sure and  let me know if something else comes up. (Yeah, sure.)

*Nurse Ratched

Nurse Ratched played by Louise Fletcher

A cold-hearted nurse in the Ken Kesey’s 1975 film adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. She has complete control of a state mental institution and its patients. The movie was a success and actor Jack Nicholson playing the rebellious R.P. McMurphy won an Academy Award for his role.