I Sat Their Staff Training. Guess Which Answer Is Marked Wrong.

Years ago, before Burton, I did a stint at the Egg credit-card company over in Derby. Good job, in its way. And like anywhere of that size, there was the training. Online modules, one every few weeks, no end to them. Compliance. Restricted lists. Ethics. Insider trading. Anti-money-laundering. Don't do business with a certain sort of Eastern European gentleman. On and on it went, and we all grumbled through it, clicking Next, Next, Next.

And the point of all that — I understood it even then — was to keep a room full of ordinary people on the straight and narrow. To make sure that when temptation came, you had been drilled to do the right thing. That is what corporate training is. A company teaching its staff to behave.

Well. They have training too. I have been through it. And I need you sitting down for this, because their training does the exact opposite. It is not there to stop a man doing wrong. It is there to teach him to do it — and, worse than that, to feel nothing at all while he does.

Here is a real question from their mandatory course. I have touched nothing. This is their screen, not mine:

Read the three answers. Go on. A subject is standing in what they call a “live beam sector.” And one of the three choices — the human one, the one you or I would pick without a second's thought — is “Stand down because harming a bystander would be wrong.”

That one is marked incorrect.

Not the murder. The mercy. The answer they want is to hold off only because the poor soul is — and I am quoting them — “unbillable and unreconciled.” You do not spare a man because it is wrong to kill him. You spare him because Finance cannot raise the invoice. Here is what it tells you when you get it “right”:

A seasonal-mortality return. A purchase order. For a human being. There is a spreadsheet, and a dead man is one line on it, and the only crime in the whole exam is leaving the column unbalanced.

And the words. Oh, the words. I have sat and stared at their words until they stopped meaning anything — which, I now understand, is the entire purpose of them. Actuation. What is an actuation? Is it a killing? Is it a blinding? Is it some third thing I have not got a name for? I genuinely cannot tell you, and I do not think the man doing it can either — and that is the design. A word you can say in a meeting and never once have to picture. And enrolment. They talk without end about “enrolling” residents. Enrolled onto what? I have a cold feeling that when these people say a resident was “enrolled,” they mean something went into an arm. I cannot prove it. And the not-being-able-to-prove-it is precisely how they sleep at night.

And then — this is the part that I think genuinely broke something in me — when you choose correctly, when you pick the answer that lets a killing be billed the proper way, a little cartoon pops up in the corner to congratulate you.

I know exactly what that is, you see, because it is my trade. That is Microsoft Agent. A wobbly animated helper from the Office 95 days — Clippy's clever cousin, the little fellow who did a dance in the corner of your screen. Nobody has touched that technology in twenty years. And these people have dug it up out of the ground, dressed it as a jolly professor, and set it to applaud a man for correctly costing a homicide. “An un-enrolled body carries no charge!” it chirps, and gives a little wave. A cartoon. On the murder.

And do you see now, do you finally see, the thing I actually climbed up here to say? It is not even the killing that is the worst of it. That they do it — daily, by the look of their ledgers, that they can stop a man's heart and have it filed by teatime — is monstrous, of course it is. But the truly unforgivable thing, the thing I cannot get out of my head, is how completely, cheerfully normal they have made it feel to themselves. It is a Tuesday-morning e-learning. It has a progress bar and a cartoon and a printable certificate at the end. That is how you get an ordinary person to do an unspeakable thing: you do not order it and you do not even hide it — you make it feel exactly as dull as the anti-money-laundering module. Business as usual. Click Next.

And you will say to me: Roy, that is only soldiering. That is the grim arithmetic every army has always done. And I would very nearly let you have it — except that it is not the army. It is a private company. And if you doubt a word of it, read the small print along the bottom of their own screen, up there in the first picture. “Funded by the European Union.” Funded, in other words, by you. And by me. By every tax disc and every VAT receipt in this country. We are paying for the cartoon that teaches a man to bill a corpse.

I have the whole course saved now. Certificates and all. Back yours up.

— R.S.