WFM or iRobot?

I am not (quite) a robot but I'm close to being machine busy (not true). It's just innocent social research work from the cat infested couch. In my revised working life I've become a professional voice. A hollow set of questions and polite noises trapped and wrapped in telephone wires and imageless Skype mechanisms. I chat with my clients carefully, safe from Covid and ridicule so they can tell me what they think and I can silently nod or roll my eyes or smile, sticking to the script, mostly. People, it turns out are not so bad, they just need to talk, to tell other people things. Who would have thought that? If you don't ever talk out loud and hear your own opinions then you're a ticking time bomb. It's that simple.

Not only am I a professional voice, a bit like Sean Connery used to be I suppose, I'm also a professional listener. Children crying and dogs barking in the background, over tuned TV sets, traffic grazing past, eating sounds, piped music and mysterious electrical blips. Is anyone listening to the listener I wonder? And then there is time, time monitors calls and conversations like an industrial process, we always know how long it all took. Unrecorded bits of history that are actually recorded and will never die as they translate into binary segments or summaries chasing themselves around in hot servers for what passes for a day's work these days. WFM, Working From Home. What does it all really mean?

There's an decent online forum happening that's all about paranoia but I don't think that you were included in the invitation.