I don’t wish to alarm anyone, but I think one of our job applicants is secretly a robot. I’m not totally sure, but I’m not about to be that one guy, you know? Maybe he’s just a robotic fellow and would be a great worker and I’m letting my biases get in the way. And if he is a robot, who really cares? We have an anti-discrimination policy, so it’s not like we can reject him based on that.
Like…some of my friends are robots. I don’t know for sure, but what I’m saying is that if they were robots it wouldn’t bother me, at all.
Anyway, this guy came into the interview and said that he’d been looking into office design here in Melbourne and his fascination with the human obsession with aesthetics made him curious to get a job and see things from the inside. And then he quickly added that he obviously understands humans because he is one, but he wanted to learn more because he was from another country.
Okay. So that was weird (he didn’t look foreign, but I wasn’t going to say that, gosh, anyone can be anything, equal opportunities, you do you) but I gave him a chance and we got him to do a practice assignment in the office like we do with all our candidates. He was a total wizard withe the design software, and while his actual design left something to be desired when it comes to our particular style, it was ruthlessly efficient. I’ve never seen anything so utilitarian, but it just worked, from a productivity standpoint. There are folks, even clients of ours, who would see that as a bonus.
Our team is still quite small, and we don’t actually do the physical office fitouts here in Melbourne. I guess we’re more of an avant garde ideas house, so I guess we could really diversify by having a robot on the team. I, uh…not that I think he’s an actual robot! That’d be silly. Robots don’t look like people, not yet.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that! They can look however they like. It’s a free country.
-Jace