‘Sure.’ Everyone was friendly and, realistically, people used names less often than they thought they’d have to. All the call centre staff used fake names on calls. One side of the room was the ‘Anne and John’ side and the other was the ‘Jane and Dave’ side. The names had been user-tested. People didn’t feel threatened by Anne and John and Jane and Dave. Peggy or Greta were Anne, and Niall was John along with ten other people.

When they were at home, working as a moderator, they often wouldn’t change out of their pyjamas. They would mooch around the house, making cups of red bush tea with soy milk, watching the comments roll in and their script working in real time. Sometimes people said awful things. Sometimes people said okay things but in awful ways. Peggy or Greta were able to have conversations with other people on the message boards at the same time as they watched the comments and their script, but every now and then things would go crazy and they were flat out. The at-home job was like that – slow periods of fractured concentration punctuated by frantic, focused activity. In the slow periods they watched the script, refining and sometimes letting it run on the software. In the busy times they had to ignore the script and just do the job like they were the script. Someone from the website would message them through the interface. ‘Have you got a fucking eye on this?’ ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ but they were thousands of miles away and there was no time to answer them, anyway. They had to show they had their eye on it. Around lunchtime, or usually a bit after if there had been a clusterfuck, they logged off the interface and made some toast and ate it in front of the computer and went back over the last shambles and looked at how the script had handled it. They were always refining, and it was getting better and better.

Eventually it was time to finish at the call centre. Another set of people, who had been working there longer and got paid more, arrived for the night shift. Peggy or Greta walked to the train station. Sometimes they walked with people from work, but most of the call centre people lived in the suburb close to the office. Peggy and Greta wondered if maybe they should live out closer to work, but they hadn’t moved yet. They would catch the train home and there would always be a seat like there was in the morning, and the city would come into view and they were happy they lived in town.