Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Awkward Office Christmas Party

Somewhere in the not so distant future, the management team of a big company had to decide about whether or not to have a Christmas party. The management, entirely robotized, came together in the virtual boardroom. It took a few minutes for their brains to get synchronized and the topics of the meeting to be loaded.
A Christmas party! Do we still need this old fashioned stuff, now over half of our employees consists of robots? But the humans seem to value it hugely. We could do away with Christmas parties and inviting humans to Christmas parties at the same time. Our change implementation manual however says we should implement step by step, so it is either skipping the Christmas party of skipping the attendance of humans at the party. It took only a minute of balancing and synchronizing their minds to decide they would first skip the humans and next year skip the party. This seemed the right order of implementation.
So a meeting was organized where only robots were invited to. There was no necessity for food, candles or a Christmas tree. If necessary they could in unison flash their emergency lights. Music would still be played in the background. It could give such a pleasant vibration.
“Dear fellow robots, loyal employees of the company”, the management team shouted in unison, “Lets celebrate the coming of Christmas, a time of reflection, time for a holiday break.... correction....The wrong Christmas address must have been loaded. We mean: Have a nice maintenance break. Don't you dare to take time for reflection, you're to expensive for such nonsense. And for now: Let the Christmas party begin!” Everyone flashed his emergency lights and heavy music was played, but apart from that nothing happened. No social talk, no silly humans getting drunk and to be driven home, no leftover food to clean away afterwards. It was considered the worst Christmas party ever. But what to do next year? Throw out the Christmas party altogether or invite the humans to join again. One must admit humans were very good at useless things, much better than robots. As the first step of the implementation had failed, the manual prescribed to go back to the former step, which was inviting humans again to the Christmas party.

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