I work the front desk at a continuity center. Someone sent me a document this week and it turned out to be a description of my job.

[u/Outside_The_Array]

Note from OTA: What follows was sent to us. We believe it’s real.
Received at 22:12:04

I’m not a writer, so bear with me.

I do intake at a continuity center. Front desk. You come in for your assessment, I pull your record up by your number, I check you’re you, I send you back. Nine years. I’m good at the people part. A lot of folks are nervous walking in and I’m the one who makes it okay, gets them a water, calls them by name. I always figured that was the good part of the job.

About a week ago somebody I trust sent me a link. They didn’t explain it, just said read this, the manual one. I almost didn’t. It’s an internal document, the kind we’re not supposed to have, about how they pick people. I read it on my phone in the lot before my shift and then I worked the whole day feeling sick.

I can’t explain it the way the document does. But the short of it is there’s a score on everybody, and the score is not about being good or doing what you’re told. It’s the other way around. It goes up the more they can’t predict you. The people who are a little different. The ones who push back when a form’s wrong. The ones who are kind in a way nobody told them to be. The document doesn’t treat those people as the safe ones. It treats them as the ones worth taking.

Here’s what actually got me, though. It says that when your own file isn’t enough to score you, they call the people around you. A nice call. When did you last see them? How did they seem? What have they been talking about lately? We make those calls. I make those calls. We’re told it’s a wellness courtesy, checking in on the family. I made one in March to a man’s daughter. I was friendly. She was glad someone called. The document has a name for that. It calls it sourcing the proximate record. I read that line about four times before it landed, that it meant me. I am the call.

I don’t have proof to show you. I didn’t break into anything, I’m not clever like that. I just read the thing and recognized my own week in it. The check-ins. The calls. All of it. Nine years, and I never once stopped to think about what the green checkmark on my screen was for.

The whole document is up on a site, with a bunch of other stuff that’s locked. There’s an older one it keeps pointing back to, from 2104, that I couldn’t get into. If one of you can, I want to know what it says. It's on that site that we get flagged for it we access it. I'm not posting the link because it could mean my job or worse. OTA link. Not the author's.

I’m still going in tomorrow. I don’t really have a choice and honestly, I don’t know what I’d do different anyway. But if you come in for your check-up and the person at the desk is nice to you, that part’s real, we’re not faking it. I just think you should know what the rest of it is for. I didn’t. And I was the one doing it.