Employee fired from work for suffering from a chronic case of “the human condition”
In an email correspondence, Atlas Cumber, 32, disclosed that the illness had been congenital. “I’ve had it since birth, and it was really fine, at least initially. I never felt unfit for the job. But rising expectations at work started making me look increasingly uncompetitive. My last performance appraisal said that I wasn’t as productive as the machines employed for the same task”.
Brian further threw light on the daily anxiety that humans face in an age of increasing automation. “Everyday I felt a dilemma of whether to conceal or reveal my condition to colleagues. I was constantly anxious that I will be ‘found out’ and my ‘luck’ will run out. Either I’d not be able to meet the deadlines, which were becoming shorter as the algorithms became faster, or I would not be able to give the expected throughput, which was increasing as the memory chips improved. I was afraid my bosses will give up on me and I’ll be out of a job.”
Despite his best efforts, they did. “I kept putting in more and more hours - signing in early morning and working till late. But my reviews kept getting worse and worse. Eventually, I was told that my disability was actively interfering with my work.”
Cases like Brian’s are becoming more and more common. Since most jobs can now be done more efficiently, cheaply and smartly by machines, there is a growing conversation about the role of employees inflicted with humanity at the workplace.
“Being a human is the primary obstacle for some employees to work at the level expected of them. They take longer to understand machine code; waste time on meetings, demand lunch breaks between work and need rest overnight. There are major productivity drops across the board, ” said the company’s HR chatbot when asked for comment. “Having humans on the team has time and resource costs which we just cannot afford in this competitive economy, ” it further added.
While the human condition has been prevalent since ancient times, experts have only recently started realising the true extent of its debilitating effects. A recent census found that its incidence has grown exponentially: with an estimated 7 billion reported cases, its prevalence has doubled in the last decade alone. The panidemic claims hundreds and thousands of lives every day, and has been identified by experts as the next major barrier to economic growth.
27 October 2018