Do you actually think that the little gold shapes you tap on your glass screen are helping the person on the other side of the world or are you just doing it so the box goes away and you can finally put your phone down?

It is a hard thing to ask yourself when you are tired and the house is quiet and the only thing moving is the little blinking line in a chat window. We have been taught to be polite and we have been told that our voice matters and we have been sold the idea that every click is a brick in a better world. But I have spent too many nights awake in the dark to believe that anymore and I think you know the truth even if you do not want to say it out loud in the middle of the day.

The Midnight Kitchen Incident

It was 1:12 am and the kitchen was full of the smell of something that used to be food. I work the third shift as a baker and my life happens when the rest of the city is a dream and I am usually very good at watching the clock. But I was on a call with a support person and I was trying to fix an issue with my bank and I forgot about the pan on the stove.

The water boiled away and the pasta turned into a black crust and the smoke started to reach for the ceiling. The problem with the bank was solved by the fifth message and the person named Sarah or maybe it was a bot named Sarah had done what I asked. She was fast and she was clear and I should have been able to walk away and save my dinner. But the conversation did not end when the help ended and that is where the ghost in the machine starts to show its teeth.

Message six arrived and it was a polite request for a rating. Message seven arrived before I could even find the pan handle and it was a thank you in advance for my time and my loyalty. I stood there with a ruined meal and a house full of smoke and I had to decide if I was going to be a good person or a fast person.

I tapped the five stars because I wanted the pings to stop and I wanted to open the window and I wanted to forget that I had failed at the one simple task of boiling water. The system got its number and the report got its data point and I got a cold house and a hungry belly.

That number did not describe the service and it did not describe the help and it certainly did not describe the fact that I was standing in a cloud of burnt wheat. It only measured how much I wanted the noise to go away.

The Performance of Politeness

I used to be wrong about this and I will admit it now because there is no sense in lying when the sun is not even up yet. I used to think that those surveys were a bridge between me and the company and I thought I was doing a favor for the worker. I believed the lie that a high score meant a bonus for Sarah and a low score meant the company would fix its broken parts.

I sat there for years and I gave my honest thoughts and I wrote little notes in the comments box and I acted like I was a judge at a fair. I was wrong and I see that now because the measurement has become the thing itself and the actual help is just the excuse to ask for the score.

The support world is built on these metrics and they call them satisfaction scores but they do not measure how happy you are. They measure how well the agent has learned to beg without sounding like a beggar and they measure how well the script can trap you into a corner of politeness.

The agent knows that their job depends on that gold star so they spend the last three minutes of the talk setting the stage and they use your name too much and they ask if there is anything else they can do even when there is clearly nothing left to say. They are not talking to you and they are talking to the graph that the boss looks at on Monday morning and you are just the hand that moves the needle.

This happens everywhere and it happens even in places where the stakes are high and the money is real. If you are playing games on a site like

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you want the support to be fast because you want to get back to the game or you want to see your money in the bank. You do not want a long talk about your feelings and you do not want to be part of a research project.

You want the truth and you want the speed and you want the person to be a person and not a ghost reading a card. But the system forces them to be ghosts and it forces you to be a sensor. When the measurement is the goal it stops being a good measurement and it just becomes a game that everyone has to play.

The agents learn which words make people click the button and they learn when to send the request so you are too tired to say no and they learn how to frame the help so it feels like a personal favor. It is a performance and we are the audience and the price of the ticket is our data. The final exchange of every chat belongs to the system and it does not belong to the two people who were just trying to fix a mistake.

The Proof of the Baker

I think about this when I am at the bakery and I am pulling loaves out of the oven. I do not ask the bread if it enjoyed the heat and I do not ask the customers to rate my smile on a scale of one to ten before I give them their bag.

If the crust is golden and the middle is soft then the work is good and the proof is in the eating. But in the digital world we have lost the ability to let the work speak for itself and we have replaced the work with a shadow of the work. We spend more time talking about the quality than we spend making the quality and that is why the dinner burns and the smoke stays in the air.

The most reliable thing a satisfaction score measures is how many people were too tired to fight back. It is a measure of exhaustion and it is a measure of the social pressure to be nice to a stranger who is just a name on a screen. If I give you a five it might be because you were great or it might be because I have a black slab of pasta in my hand and I need to cough. The machine does not know the difference and the boss does not care about the difference and the world keeps spinning on a pile of fake numbers.

Choosing the Silence

I stopped filling them out unless the service was so bad that I felt the heat of it or so good that I felt like I found a long lost friend. Most of the time I just close the window and I let the silence be the answer. I think the silence is more honest than the gold star and I think the silence is the only way to tell the machine that we are not sensors and we are not data points.

We are people with burned dinners and third shifts and lives that do not fit into a box on a report. The agents might suffer for a while if we all stop playing the game but then the companies would have to find a new way to see if the work is being done.

They might have to actually look at the logs and they might have to see if the question was answered and they might have to treat the workers like people who have skills instead of dogs who need a treat. It is a hard shift to make and it will take a long time and there will be many messages in between. But I would rather live in a world where the silence means something than a world where every five star rating is a lie told to a ghost.

I finished my shift this morning and I walked home in the gray light and I thought about Sarah and her seven messages. I hope she is doing well and I hope she does not get in trouble for my missing rating. But I also hope she knows that she was enough without the gold star and her work was done when the bank was fixed.

The rest of it was just noise and the smoke has finally cleared from my kitchen and I think I will just have a piece of bread and go to sleep. There are no stars in the sky this morning and the world is just fine without them.

The next time your phone dings and the screen asks you how you feel you should stop and look at the room around you. Look at the clock and look at your hands and look at the people you love. That moment belongs to you and it does not belong to the measurement system and you do not owe the machine a single click.

You can just put the phone down and let the ghost wait in the dark and you can be a person who does not need a rating to know that they exist. It is a small thing to do but it is the only way to take back the end of the conversation and make it yours again.

We have given away too much of our time to the people who want to turn our lives into a chart and I am done with the charts and I am done with the gold shapes. I just want the bread to be good and the help to be fast and the rest of the world to leave me alone when the work is finally finished.