Customer service jobs used to be largely outsourced to countries where it cost less to staff a call center, India and Mexico and China and even Brazil. That changed shortly after the tech industry shifted its heart to Washington. Now, any company that wants to be considered for tax breaks under American law must be able to prove at least sixty percent of their staff is employed in North America. Some companies staff their centers in Canada, but that’s less about tax breaks and more about fear of the weather continuing to shift, forcing the companies to move again, over the border, into the great thawing north. Most companies wanted to be able to continue saying they were American—go patriotism, go marketing—and so they brought their call centers home, eating the cost of domestic labor in the pursuit of future profit.

Thankfully, American call centers came with American unions, and unions came with the kind of demands unions have been making since they first began. When the call centers came back, they weren’t the horror-story factories we’d heard of from older friends and relatives. We still spent our shifts yoked to phone, email, and chat, but we weren’t subjected to “open floor plans” that seemed like genius to management looking to be sure we weren’t playing online during work hours, but which had turned even the briefest customer interaction into a struggle not to piss off our coworkers. We had reasonable attendance policies and benefit packages, and a glorious lack of dress codes.

I approached the front door, swiped my badge, and got the brief green light that signaled my permission to be in the building. I stepped inside, my coworkers repeating the procedure behind me, and smirked. It’s always amused me, the way green equals “go” in American culture. That whole “secretly a plant person” thing.

Well. Not so secretly. Despite years of therapy as a child, and several managers telling me the joke has gotten old and I’d have an easier time getting promoted if I’d knock it off, I’ve never been able to swallow the urge to tell everyone I spend any extended period of time with that hey, by the way, I’m here because the invasion is coming, and people should probably know. It’s like a nervous tic. Hi, nice to meet you, my name’s Anastasia, I’m secretly an intelligent alien plant and one day everything you love will be devoured.

Mostly people are pretty cool about it, because mostly people don’t believe me. It’s funny how that works.