u/dinkypin

This is so dumb and I need to get it off my chest. I’m fudging names and details, obviously.

Some background for context: At my office, we all have our own laptops and do hot desking, so when you start your shift you just grab whatever desk is free in your team’s area and plug your laptop into the monitor. Chairs are normally shared as well but several people have their own special chairs due to disability that nobody else is allowed to use. The special chairs all have official signage on them with the name of the person it belongs to and a reminder not to use or adjust them. There are also 2 dedicated sit/stand desks allocated for the people who need them for medical reasons, but they are still hot desks so technically anyone can use them so long as they move desks if someone who needs a special desk asks them to. In practice, people just leave them free unless there’s no normal desks available and if they do want to use one everyone is pretty good about checking the schedule to see if one of us is on shift, since it’s not a huge team and everyone pretty much knows which of us need to use those desks. 

The coworker in question and I both have one of the dedicated chairs and both need to use one of the special desks. I’m on an earlier shift and Coworker starts later, after I finish. She always sits at the same desk of the two special ones and I started sitting at that desk as well, because it just makes sense for her and I to alternate since we have more predictable schedules and it leaves the other desk available for anyone with more varied shift patterns to use if they need it. This also means that I’ve spoken to this woman maybe 4 times ever and up until now there’s been no drama at all. Literally all I know about her beyond her name is that she has a different type of special chair than mine, works on different systems and usually does evening shifts. 

A few weeks ago, I came in and there was a laminated sign on the monitor stating that it was Coworker’s dedicated desk and could only be used when she isn’t on shift. It had the company logo on it and was in the same format as the signs we put on the custom chairs for people with disabilities (including mine!), so I assumed it was legit and there was some reason she had to use that specific desk. The way they are positioned means the two desks get different levels of natural light, so I figured she had an accommodation in place that wasn’t my business and just started double-checking the schedule to confirm Coworker wasn’t starting early doing overtime before I sat there, and putting the sign back up on the monitor when I finished work to make sure it was left free for her. No big deal. 

Two days ago, I came in and there’s a photo of a kid stuck to the bottom of the monitor with blue tack. Obviously having a photo of a random kid in my direct eyeline all day is weird and uncomfortable, so I pull it off and stick it down to the desk instead, in a way where I can block the view and don’t have to look at it while I’m working. Yesterday morning, the photo is back, this time taped to the monitor, and the sign has an extra note added in Sharpie saying to leave the photo where it is.

I email Coworker (since again our shifts don’t overlap so I can’t speak to her in person) explaining that I moved it because it’s hugely uncomfortable to have it there and asking if she can leave it where I put it, so she can still see it when she’s working but I can cover it when I am using the desk.

I get an incredibly passive aggressive email back claiming that the photo is necessary for her mental health, that it’s her desk anyway, and accusing me of leaving the desk a mess after my shifts (not true). I reply with a professionally worded but admittedly equally passive aggressive email saying it might be her desk but other people use it when she isn’t in, I haven’t been leaving messes and I’m asking for a very reasonable compromise in just having the photo 3 inches from where it was previously so I don’t have a stranger’s child staring at me while I’m working.

I initially also wrote another whole paragraph about how wildly irresponsible it is to have the picture up anyway and asking why the hell she was comfortable leaving a photo of a child in an open office where literally anyone could see it. I ended up taking that part out before I sent it since it crossed over from passive aggressive to just aggressive, because it’s just so monumentally stupid of her! We’ve had a bunch of new people start recently and while we do get background checked at this job it takes a while, so people can be working here for a couple of weeks before anything bad might be flagged up. She knows this, and the kid is wearing a school uniform in the picture with the NAME OF THE SCHOOL clearly visible! It just blows my mind.

Anyway, a couple of hours into my shift, my manager pulls me aside and asks what’s going on, so I recap the whole stupid exchange and this is where it gets REALLY dumb. The manager confirmed that the hot desking/clear desk rules still apply even if you use the dedicated sit/stand desks or have your own chair, and it turns out that Coworker made the sign herself and just fully invented this rule about it being her desk, and then gone to her team manager to get him to enforce it when management had no idea this was going on. She also apparently accused me of throwing the photo of the kid on the floor when I left yesterday, since she found it there when she came in even though I left it on the desk.

My manager is doing that careful phrasing where she’s making it clear it’s all total bullshit, and she confirms the photo shouldn’t be there at all and the sign has already been removed. She also asked me to forward over our email exchange (I was very glad I took out the part accusing Coworker of being irresponsible) and told me to come straight to her in future instead of approaching Coworker directly. Reading between the lines, Coworker already had other strikes against her and now she’s in more hot water for making up her own rules and trying to get me in trouble for breaking them.

I'm just amazed at how badly Coworker screwed herself. She could have just left the photo where I moved it and I would have been fine with it. It was literally a difference of having the photo hanging off the bottom of the monitor or lying flat on the desk in the exact same spot. I wasn’t going to speak to my manager about it and I would have happily kept going along with her made up rules about claiming a particular desk, I just wanted to do my job without having to constantly look at a photo of someone else’s young child. Instead now she’s got herself in trouble and I had to have another incredibly stupid conversation with my manager at the end of my shift to confirm that I have left the photo on the desk exactly where I put it yesterday, it hasn’t been thrown on the floor otherwise desecrated, and I’m officially leaving the whole issue in her hands. Thankfully since we’re on such different shifts, I won’t have to deal with any in-person drama if Coworker does kick off about the whole thing, so I can go back to being a good little corporate drone in peace!

It’s a prank or a marketing gimmick or a bad data scrape or something, the adverts going up online all of a sudden:

>!!!Volunteers wanted for alien abduction, safe return guaranteed within 48 hours!!!

There’s a link you can click on to fill out an application. The ads are charming in a very dated ‘graphic design is my passion’ kind of way. The aliens are represented by clipart from the 2003 edition of Microsoft Word. The link to the signup form is in in comic sans, for fucks sake. It wouldn’t have been noticed at all, except that the ads pop up embedded into the UI of all major operating systems on desktop, mobile and gaming platforms and after a full 3 weeks, still haven’t been removed despite patches being deployed on a scale not seen since Y2K prevention. Four separate hacker groups take credit for it, all of them obviously lying. Official statements from both governments and tech companies have a hint of panic to them, setting off a whole new ecosystem of conspiracy theories about the apparent alien recruitment super-virus infecting the entire internet.

The memes also flow freely, most of them low effort variations on the theme of anal probing but some mutating and multiplying, using references so obscure and multilayered that to understand them you needed to have been terminally online since at least 1999 or willing to do postgraduate level research into the last 50 years of science fiction in popular culture and the etymology of modern online meme dialects. 

The ads go away after a while, and three months later several major tech companies release a joint statement and publish a paper with the Electronic Frontier Foundation talking about the work done to remove them. People move on. A Reddit AMA thread briefly goes viral when the OP claims he was abducted and went through an in-depth interview process about human society. The thread gets quoted by several content mills and the memes have a brief but glorious resurgence. A couple of official government accounts try to join in on the joke, by which point it is generally declared dead.

And sure, there are other stories of people who clicked on the ads and filled out the form actually vanishing for a couple of days, but those are largely dismissed as bots karmafarming or astroturfing for whatever summer sci-fi movie is trying to be the next big viral marketing story. At least one of them has real staying power as a copypasta due to the writer’s embrace of a sincere but baffled tone during their description of ‘really chill dudes with REALLY big guns who really like bananas’. 

Then the aliens say hello.

They pick the most heavily surveilled place in the world, with as many CCTV cameras and phones pointed at them as possible.They walk in disguised as tourists, only to remove the disguises and start encouraging people to film while they start doing weird alien shit. One of them is holding their own phone up to film the one speaking and displaying a QR code linking to a livestream, which almost immediately has to be moved to its own dedicated server to handle the viewership traffic. They are floating in a forcefield 2 feet off the ground.

“Hello everyone,” one of them says. “Please don’t panic. We are the representatives of the [unintelligible] species. We are currently being tracked and monitored by others for our own safety, so please don’t attempt any form of aggression, abduction or removal. We’d like to talk to you all. It’s cool, we’re all human.”

They are very clearly not human. They sit there as the initial panic subsides with their seven mismatched limbs(maybe?) and 2 different types of (probably?) eyes, levitating in a forcefield bubble, talking to people quite happily and sticking their appendages through the force field to shake hands, explaining to anyone who wants to listen that they’re the group responsible for introducing their species to humanity at large, and occasionally politely asking armed police, white-coated academics, gun-toting nutjobs and covert agents to stop trying to arrest/murder/detain/signal jam them. They will only speak to any one person for a while before moving on, and they refuse to have private conversations with any type of official. None of the officials accept the offer to talk in public. 

They also continue to insist that they are human.

It must be a translator error, someone says.

“It's not a translator error. We don’t have translators, this isn’t Star Trek. We’re using your language. We learned it specially and everything,” replies the one with the greenish arm-web thing.

Someone else tries to explain that we’re the humans, not them. Human is a word that refers to us as a species.

This time it’s the one with all their (almost definitely) eyes on the left side of their head(can a head also be an elbow?) who answers.

“Nope. Your species is homo sapiens. Ours is [unintelligible]. We are human.”

People keep trying to argue and explain until finally the one with the wing-gill thing takes over.

“Look, it’s simple. Your species is homo sapiens. Human is the classification of being you acknowledge as sentient and possessing intrinsic rights. Human beings. Human rights. You are a homo sapien. I am [unintelligible]. We are both human. There are many different human species beyond this world that would also like to meet you, but we’ve been watching you for a while and we know what you’re capable of. We’re not taking any chances here, friends. Once you guys accept that we’re all human and acknowledge that in a written and binding form under your own legal structures we can hang out, but we're not helping you get off the planet until you stop calling us aliens. Now, are you gonna be cool about this or should we just go home?”