TBS (the Borg) and the Alien of Plur1bus want Submission

 

First off, if you have ever studied Behavioural Economics, you are likely of the mind that what people choose to do can tip towards the irrational, people are not easy to understand. You can get philosophical and suggest we have no free will so everything should be predictable, but you know it is not.

Rationally or not, I sat and watched Plur1bus. It is a tv series where aliens have taken over the brains of all people except a dozen or so and in so doing they have basically turned them into service units connected by one mind. Those few exempted ones have some special genetic properties that must first be extracted from them, manipulated and reintroduced physically to convert them into subjects of the central alien mind. In the first episodes we see a mass extinction which ensues when one of the exempted ones gets angry at one of the alien-controlled ones. Thousands die but there is no express reason for how or why they die. Their death seems to be a reckoning for the indiscretion. Their deaths also seem to be for the purpose of producing alien food from their human carbon-based corpses. The main character of the show is a LGBTQ+ author who is exempted and is decidedly against this invasion for whatever reasons she might have, while some of the other exempted ones like this new situation. Think of it, everyone is being super nice and accommodating. Eventually she bumps hip to what is going down with the nutrient drink being produced and consumed by these otherwise normal humans (minus only their free thought.)

I have probably not told you enough to spoil the plot, but I would like to relate this to my work life at Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. I was one of those people who told people with computer related problems to reboot. This was amongst my other duties. My office was at the service desk, and the service desk was under the chief Information officer who again was under the Corporate Services Sector headed by Karen Cahill the Assistant Deputy Minister under the Secretary, Peter Wallace. I mention these people’s names because they are sort of central to what I want to relate here. Normally I would have nothing to do with those two except that I was the shop steward. Why I allowed myself to be squeezed into that role I will never understand. I think it is part of my personality makeup to require periodic change in my environment from time to time. Case in point, I had not previously worked anywhere for more than nine months as an employee or as a contractor before getting hired at TBS.  I was fifty when I started there and notwithstanding the changes that occurred in the department since then, I managed to stay afloat there for 12 years. I usually found myself at cross purposes with the CIO who I will say unequivocally was the single most unpleasant person I have ever come into contact with as a subordinate in my 33 years of government of Canada tech support. I would learn that his gayness did not allow for inclusion of non-gay men and he held private parties for them with his expense account covering it. As steward I received complaints about some of his unwanted sexual innuendos.

TBS is a tough place to figure out. They consider themselves the trends and standards setters and the core central agency. I know this because I sat across the table from executives of the many departments who came to pronounce upon the improvements they have made to things over the last six months or a year, things affecting wide scope of government services. We were supposed to meet regularly but that depended on whether the Secretary at the time was amenable to holding a management/ labour meeting. I too had things to say, like about the air quality at l’Esplanade Laurier, the main building before the Flaharty Building was constructed. Once, when presented a partial summary of the air quality report I called the company and convinced an employee there to send me the full report. It confirmed asbestos to be present. I became like a dog with a bone at those meetings.

Another one of my chief irritants was the PS Employee Survey that asked all the employees how they rated various aspects of their work life. The main problem being that there are exempted employees in the hundreds who have no reason to be honest about it and every reason to lie and say things were really good. The way the data is collected allows the survey administrators to zoom in on where the issues are. It also allows them to spot the disaffected ones. I tossed this out to Mr. Wallace after he told those assembled that he completed the survey and was pleased to report that he was very satisfied with his job. Since his inclusion as the head of the department might skew the survey results, I asked if he would cleanse the data. I think that made him very upset. Karen was sitting there taking notes.

In Plur1bus everyone who is not controlled by the alien mind yet, acts really nicely. TBS, or Borg, as some refer to it, expected that standard from employees. It was a weird place in that way, we had to take customer service courses, we had to do team building exercises and have our ethics fine-tuned. But there were always these exempted ones who could come by and shit on us basically telling us what to do and we got disciplined if we did not comply. Karen called me into a meeting, and she asked me why I did not acquiesce when one of these entitled people (with no ID) came to get a replacement secret network card. It should seem a simple thing to answer to everything, but it was not enough, this same person accused me of some other shit I didn’t do but had to answer to. If I am painting a picture here of a dysfunctional department, or one that is opposite to what they claim to aspire to, it is not coincidental. I am bitter about the rough ride, but I did not let my emotions prevail. No, I did not tell Mohammed to leave his religion out of the workplace, nor did I tell him to be civilized when he interrupted my lunch to suggest I work on something. None of the things I was accused of were given in context and the service desk manager told me that this (what I was accused of saying) was very disturbing. I had to beg to be excused if I did not see it that way myself.

Two days after one of my fellow employees, one who had a complaint about unwanted advances, disappeared from work and did not return. He had shown me the texts, and I had planned to speak to the CIO about it, but his disappearance made the point moot. The PIPSC, the union, was mum. I don’t know whether you have these feelings too, when you get the feeling that you are in a Kafkaesque situation and you have to test the walls to see if they are real. I did. I knew a few of my fellow employees were being influenced by the manager and they were collecting any evidence they could so he could report back to the ADM. I was expelled from that place several years ago and still look back in a sense of incredulity. I was in the washroom with a colleague, and we were discussing dinner plans. I now know he shared the conversation with the other ones I mentioned, and the information was shared with the manager. He told me he was going to eat pizza with the others and did I want to come. He asked me if I had plans and I told him I was still working until 4:30 but I planned to go home and eat my wife.

It would have been so easy to correct that, to say my wife’s cooking.  But I let it hang there. When this all came to a head with the subsequent disciplinary measures, I had another chance to correct it and I did not. To understand my behaviour, you need to know that I was under an amazing amount of pressure and I was on some mind-altering medications. The neurologist was upping the dose in large increments to treat ice pick headaches. Given that previously the ADM had told me that if I ever so much as farted I would be gone, the pressure was pretty intense, and I did not have full handle on my brains functioning. Soon after that I found myself being dumped by PIPSC and TBS who I suspect were in some sort of cozy agreement to keep this all out of the news. But it was likely never going to make the news because going back to something Karen asked me when I had confronted her with a serious security vulnerability to do with PKI and SSL encryption and authentication, “Who cares?”

I honestly wanted someone to care, and I realized very much later that it is very difficult to find someone who cares about how (government) employees are treated or data security. Let’s get back to Plur1bus and try to understand how they communicated with each other. In the show there is some kind of radio signal involved. It sounds simple, you hear the message and you respond with total submission. The only thing is there is no radio receiver, only ears. It is the complete analogy of the Kool-Aid – you drink it and you submit. I wish I had some answers that could end the madness, but I will just have to sit tight until the next season is aired. I am looking forward to rescuing humanity.