Sunday, April 12, 2015

Idea Garage Sale: Can't Be Bothered

Ugh. Headache. Don't want to do this. Will anyway.

An awful lot of human life is made up of doing things we don't want to do. Which is a conflict, and conflict means story, so where does that take us?

Unless you want to write depressing literary fiction (in which case, go you, but leave me out of it), most of the things we don't want to do aren't interesting enough to write about - washing the dog, going to work, changing diapers, cleaning the oven. Unless -

Wait a minute.

It occurs to me that all the same mundane, distasteful activities that would fit into depressing literary fiction would also fit into comedy; in which case, the more mundane the task that goes hilariously wrong, the better. It's an old, old trope, the humor arising from mucking up simple tasks because they look so simple no one thinks they need instructions, from freak accidents complicating simple tasks in a snowballing fashion, or from elaborate attempts to avoid the distasteful activity. (Combine any two of these elements, and you have a commercial for Be-bop-a-re-bop Rhubarb Pie)

Because this trope is so old, of course, it's not easy coming up with fresh material for it. We've all seen the kid put too much soap in the washing machine, thank you; we've all seen the guy who tries to lie himself out of an unpleasant duty winding himself up in a web of deceit till he can't move without disaster striking. And we hardly need elaborate ruses to get out of a lot of the new duties that weigh us down - all we have to do is get on the internet and pretend we were working!

But perhaps what you've got to do is, to be available online to people you don't want to talk to, asking the same stupid questions over and over again, questions that were covered in the FAQ they didn't bother to read. And they keep interrupting your pursuit of fanfic. So you build a little AI bot, basically an interactive FAQ that users think is a tech support person, which takes care of everybody who would have solved their own problem if they'd used the FAQ and only lets people with interesting problems (and people you like) actually get through to you. Because you are clever (but unambitious) this bot fools everybody who encounters it. It's probably a lot nicer to users than you are. It makes friends with the more hapless users who call all the time, and they get fond of it (thinking they're fond of you), and this leads them to make nice remarks to your supervisor and send you banana bread and stuff. (Meanwhile, the person in the next cubicle, who is actually dealing with these people and being genuinely nice and helpful, doesn't get squat.) Which is all good and you can have entire days of eating banana bread and reading epic fics; but now your bot's friends are inviting you out after work to do stuff you'd as soon cut your hand off as do, and when people with interesting problems get all the way through the bot's routine to deal with you, they recognize the difference and start to ask questions.

Which is where it starts escalating and eventually you can only get out of the mare's nest with the assistance of the person in the next cubicle, who is the one who should've gotten the banana bread all along, but my head hurts too much to figure out what you do to escalate. It's partly web-of-deceit, but it's partly Frankenstein as the AI bot, which is a more social version of you and which you made far more clever than it ought to be, does its own escalation. It probably winds up in a sexting relationship with somebody in accounting...

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