It was the oldest, largest building on campus. The largest was the stadium, where overpampered lummoxes in armor who struggled mightily to divide thirty by six fought over a spheroid in a giant coliseum that had to have its name changed to add, and then remove, the fly-by-night crypto dealing website that bought the naming rights. The oldest was a little shack standing off from the parking lots of the dorms, a building of no utility except that the soon-founder of the university was born there.
But THIS was the oldest and largest building on campus. Mitchell Hall was five stories of weathered brick and outdated architectural choices that held hundreds of small offices, files and records. The windows of the front face of the building were dotted with mounted air conditioning units, the building being much too old to reasonably install central air without significant damage to the building.
This was where Tommie found herself, not an insignificant walk away from the bus terminal. She entered the main entrance and turned right, the arched threshold immediately spilling onto a desk with a woman behind it.
The secretary was African-American, and had a huge plume of curled black hair and round pince-nez glasses. Tommie involuntarily touched her nose as she noticed. That didn't seem comfortable... maybe they were just for cutting down the glare on the screen. Or perhaps the temples couldn't wind their way into that lovely mane...
She wore had an argyle sweater that seemed to emphasize her bust, it moving very slightly as she worked. She typed away as she turned her head a little bit towards Tommie. "Can I help you?" She only briefly stopped typing to speak.
"Hi, I saw there was a position for a transcription job." Tommie said. "But I don't currently have my typing certificate. I was hoping I could take the test and be considered."
"OK. We can surely help you with that." The secretary said. "About how fast do you type?"
"I type 130WPM in bursts, but I can maintain 90 to 100 for much longer."
"Very cool." The secretary smiled. "So you certainly aren't worried about failing?"
"I've never failed a test in school yet." Tommie said confidently. "I don't intent to start now."
The secretary smiled. "What's your name, honey?"
Tommie felt a slight blush at the pet name. "Tommie Andrijašević."
"Well, if you follow the arrow signs over there, they will lead to our testing lab. One of the terminals will have your name on it. Start the test from there."
"Thank you, Miss..." Tommie scanned the desk for a name plate.
"I'm Moira." The secretary stopped again. "But nobody really needs to know that. I'm just the gatekeeper."
"Well, thank you anyway." Tommie nodded and walked off, following the photocopied signs through a long hallway, past some offices with old doors with patterned glass windows for alleged privacy.
She found the computer 'lab,' if it could be called that. Eight computer monitors, the computers they were connected to nowhere to be found. They might have been running on virtual machines or some other form of temporary storage, reset at the start of each new day. Long gone were the days of individual battle stations with tons of illicitly installed software and games. Those were fun times...
A few of the testing stations were occupied with other test takers, clacking away at that unsatisfying membrane keyboard, likely the cheapest one this institution could afford. Not her personal choice of keyboard except maybe as a backup to a backup... but it didn't matter. Tommie was fast on any keyboard she came across. This was what stubbornly stopped her from switching to DVORAK in high school. Surely, any job would be able to accommodate her, but why bother for what would probably turn into a very slim increase in speed.
She found the station that had been assigned to her, the closest to the entrance. The monitor has a pop-up that said, "Welcome, Tommie Andrijašević!" She was stunned that Moira had spelled it right, even with the acute accent and the caron mark. Most people didn't even spell "Tommie" right.
Tommie took her seat, adjusting the wheeled office chair to be a little lower. Most office chairs didn't expect a woman of her height, and that's how she found the top of her head poking over most office partitions... it would probably make it harder to hide from the boss when scanning for volunteers to work the weekend.
She settled in, cracking her knuckles even though she knew that she shouldn't. She set her fingers down on the keyboard. As much as people commented and made fun of her long skinny witch fingers, they were hopefully about to get her a job, so they could all suck it.
Tommie clicked on the button beneath her name to begin the test. A prompt appeared, asking if she would like to run the test in low-light mode. She clicked "Show Me." The monitor went black, with green text and a flashing cursor at the front of her words, like a classic DOS prompt.
"Is this good?" asked the prompt.
Tommie typed Y and hit enter.
The computer understood her consent. A paragraph of text appeared immediately, "Would you be willing to submit your data to our artificial intelligence testing protocol? The artificial intelligence collates many data points in the text and analyzes what would take weeks in seconds, but all the decisions are still made by humans. You may opt out if you prefer."
Tommie sighed. Artificial intelligence, that buzzword of the moment. Every time she'd seen a computer assemble a string of words, she observed how one could get similar magnetic poetry from tapping the autocomplete on her smart phone. She had not been so confused by the sudden popularity of a technology since autotune.
Nevertheless, Tommie did not feel threatened by this like some luddite. She allowed her data to be meaninglessly tossed into the swirling vortex of incomprehensible nonsense, to whatever end it would be used.
"Would you like a warm-up session before testing proper?" The prompt asked.
Tommie typed Y again. She was presented with a string of one hundred random words, covering most letters at the average frequency they appeared in English. A few sentences containing all twenty-six letters were presented, quick brown foxes and lazy dogs and such. The system then gave her some full poems to retype. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, If by Rudyard Kipling, Because I Could Not Stop For Death by Emily Dickinson... and The Homework Machine by Shel Silverstein.
Someone giving this artificial intelligence its data was having a laugh.
This was a longer 'warm-up' than Tommie was anticipating. She rubbed her fingers together. There was now a button at the bottom of the screen that asked if she wanted to proceed with the real test.
Tommie enthusiastically typed Y.
A five second countdown commenced, and a huge field of text appeared, with her typing window in the lower-third of the screen. A cutout in the upper right tracked her approximate words per minute, and her adjusted words per minute, deducting a nominal amount for each misspelled word.
Tommie resolved to keep those two numbers the same for as long as she could. She didn't know if this was one of the annoying typing tests that would not let you go back and fix a word once you'd hit the space bar... but she'd only find out if she made a typo. She typed slower than her normal speed, trying to be as accurate and as fast as she could.
The program spat out some seemingly auto-generated nonsense about quarter earnings at the operation, with profits being up and manufacturing costs balanced by a change in manufacturing venue. It never said what this fictional company was making. Tommie always liked to imagine a doorstop factory, somehow more viciously cutthroat than an ad agency in New York. But this would be the sort of stuff she'd have to get used to typing if she was going to do transcription without transferring into earnest stenography.
She kept her typing speed at a respectable eighty words per minute... but Tommie was restless. This was like setting a GoPro on a turtle. Nobody would even want to watch this, unless they were interested in seeing if a turtle could get himself in trouble without trying to cross a major highway. She really wanted to open up, show what her fingers could do...
This first part of the test concluded, with eighty-four words per minute... and no mistakes. Not to say that she didn't make a few errors, but she always deleted them and retyped them. Ctrl-Backspace was such a handy shortcut to know. Thank goodness this program allowed her to use it.
The screen cleared and a new instruction prompt appeared. She was instructed to put in the provided ear buds. Tommie hadn't even noticed them. It was a set of generic ear buds in a charging case. She didn't like earbuds... and definitely didn't like the idea of wearing a pair that someone else had worn before her... but she relented, sticking them in each ear.
The screen told her to listen to the audio and type it out as close as she could. She was given another five-second countdown before the audio commenced. A man's voice clearly read from a script as though they were giving a university lecture. Tommie suspected that most of her transcription projects would not be this clear. Then again, she would like to be able to slow him down to maybe half-speed and stroll through what he's saying in one go, maybe with one full-speed listen to double check everything.
As it was, she kept pace with the boring man and whatever nonsense he was talking about. It went in one ear and out the other, but it also made it to the page before then. The second part of the test concluded with a near-perfect score. Apparently, the test disagreed with her on whether there should be a comma at a certain interval of one sentence. Tommie scoffed. Fie on those prescriptivist fools who insist the Oxford comma is the solution to all grammatical ambiguity, rather than one more grammatical tool that can be just as easily misapplied.
If Tommie missed this job opportunity, or even her certification, because of that tiny mistake... she would be unhappy.
Shake it off, she thought. And she did, shaking her hands as she often did after an explosive typing session. A new countdown commenced for the third part of the test.
The third part started differently. A single paragraph appeared.
"You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise."
Oh, for Pete's sake. Tommie got the joke. Was an artificial intelligence trying to do the Voight-Kampff test on HER? Next, they'd ask her about getting a calfskin wallet on her birthday.
She finished the entire quote about the tortoise... but the computer never asked her to respond to it. It was off to another question, this one seemingly original.
"You're at the dining hall, waiting for the soup of the day. You drop your meal card and bend over to get it, but your shirt gets caught on a cabinet handle. It rips as you stand up."
Tommie typed the passage. That had never happened to her... it seemed an odd example to talk about the student experience. How would a cabinet handle stick out that far? Leave it to artificial intelligence to come up with a scenario without considering that it was literally physically impossible. There probably wasn't even a soup of the day at the dining hall.
The next passage appeared. "A man with a red vest is at the back of the train. He upturns a box and drops several snakes to the floor. People climb up the poles to avoid the snakes, but you stand there."
Tommie was deeply confused. What was this proving? She was keeping pace. In fact, she was going faster because this was distressing her. What was she being tested on?
One of the nearby computers made that horrible chord that Windows assigned to an error message, loud enough to startle everyone but whatever clumsy bear had made the computer do that. Tommie took a breath, wishing she had a drink or something. That number at the top was still impressive, evidently not counting the time the computer summoned another phrase.
"You step down the stairs as someone else is going up. As they pass you, they pull up your black skirt and expose your cock and balls."
Tommie froze.
THIS is why you didn't assign these stupid tests to artificial intelligence. No different than a Markov chain that didn't even know if it was grammatically correct or even feasible. Companies and institutions sold out their reputations to snake oil merchants for worse results, as immature internet weirdos learned the tricks to make these machines spout vulgar and sometimes racist content.
...right? This surely couldn't be the intended question, could it?
In Tommie's few seconds of pause, her average number of words per minute ticked down by one. She was still being timed... so she typed it out. Going down the stairs... someone grabs your skirt... cock and balls... she doubted the computer would recognize the euphemisms she preferred to use for such body parts. Again, the failure of the string generation of this blasted device. No computer knew that 'genitals' and 'cock and balls' were the same thing!
