She took the job. It was an international team and they built the single review tool in less than six months. About halfway through beta-testing at a presentation, Margaret made an offhand comment about the amount of data they were collecting about the moderators through the tool and wouldn’t that make an interesting management device. They jumped on it. She’d said it to show off. Part of her was angry at herself for not being more savvy about the way she’d handed over her work. She’d always said she didn’t really want to have anything to do with the features that made it possible to track every worker and everything they did, but then she went to the meeting and some guy was getting applause for his ugly code and she couldn’t hold herself back.

After the tool was built and the tracking software completed, the company wasn’t quite sure what to do with her, so they gave her the supervising role. These days she kept the menus up to date and supervised a small team of moderators in the Philippines. They paid her a small retainer which was acting exactly as that, the NDA still stood, and they didn’t have to buy anything off her because her tool was still the product of an employee. There was a supervisor on the ground, so her role was more technical. The moderators went to her when things weren’t working or if they wanted to query the results the tool returned on their productivity. There were moderation centres all over the world – Hungary, Spain, China, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. In India alone there were centres in Bangalore, Coimbatore, Gurgaon, Noida, Hyderabad, Kochi, Kolkata, Mangalore, Mumbai and Pune. There was a centre in Arizona and one in Florida. She worked with Manila, because the directors thought the time difference between her and the Philippines was more compatible, which it wasn’t. So she still worked strange hours. Her role got smaller and smaller as the years went by – they largely forgot about her, which meant she was paid for fewer and fewer hours, which meant she needed to find more work.