kyeo in anomaland
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"Thank you!" says Kyeo, and off he goes.

Okay how does voice work... work.

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It starts with more detailed questions and a bit of diagnostic imaging, and then they diagnose him with a vocal cord spasming condition and suggest injecting something into his throat about it. He can have an information packet on the injection if he wants; it has a summary of all the medical literature about the process and how well it works with what probability for what fraction of people, and the probabilities of various side effects (which, if he reads it, are pretty much just "the injection site will hurt for a while and maybe he will have a bruise on his neck"). After that, they say, it will just be the same sort of vocal training everyone else who wants a better singing voice gets.

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...that sounds pretty straightforward. He will read the information packet since that seems expected and then get jabbed in the neck.

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And then his voice will cooperate with him! The training in getting used to it again is a mix of a handcomp application that listens to him do exercises and gives feedback and advice, and meetings with a human who does much the same thing but is better at it.

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He will attend these meetings! Assuming they don't conflict with a job that hires him, which presumably will happen eventually?

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They can be flexible. He gets interview offers from two of the janitorial jobs and the drone-pilot job.

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He will attend these interviews. He is not sure how job interviews work but perhaps it will become clear.

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For the janitorial jobs it's basically a first day of work, pay and all, except that he has three weeks after that to decide if he wants the job and they likewise have three weeks to decide if they want to hire him. The drone operator interview is just flying drones around an obstacle course and some questions about how he would handle various weird situations that might be encountered by a drone patrolling a mountain range. "There's a manual, of course," they say, "but it can't cover everything and sometimes you need to think fast so we want to make sure your instincts are good."

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He will do a day of janitorial work at each place diligently and without complaint. What are the weird drone situations?

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What do you do if a bird flies into the rotor and shreds itself and also shreds the rotor? What do you do if there's a mechanical failure and the drone doesn't have enough power to get back to base? What do you do if there's a control failure and all your inputs have a thirty percent chance of doing something different from what you intended? What do you do if it just gets really foggy all of a sudden? What do you do if there's golf-ball-sized hail? What do you do if there's about to be golf-ball-sized hail in fifteen minutes?

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...is field repair possible or does the drone just need to land as safely as possible and be replaced in most of these situations? If it's foggy he might sketch what he was looking at a minute ago and try to pilot by dead reckoning, if it's important and the drone can't get over or under the fog. The hail would presumably damage the drone but again if it's time sensitive perhaps it could be piloted under tree branches.

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Drones can't repair themselves or each other but they can often be navigated back to base damaged or, if the problem is something temporary like weather, landed in a sheltered spot and put in low-power mode to wait it out. 

One of the janitor jobs says they turned out not to need more people after all, but Kyeo can take the other one or the drone pilot job or neither.

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...he is not sure how to decide between these things and asks Tazz.

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This is exactly the sort of thing Tazz is specialized in! They can provide lengthy descriptions of typical days by people in both of those job types, and a chart for writing down the weighted pros and cons of each job (e.g. the drone operator job pays better but also very occasionally requires people to respond to emergencies in the middle of the night), and more detailed breakdowns of which skills each job requires and how easy those skills are to pick up with practice, and if Kyeo is worried about how well he's likely to get along with his supervisors they can set up meetings, and here's a website with reviews of both organizations from current and former employees, and if there's any other information Kyeo can think of that will help him decide they can probably get it or something close.

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Is he to understand that "how much this job is needed" has been translated somehow into an amount of money?

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"Pretty much, yes. It's a combination of how much the job is needed and how much money the people who need it done have. Put another way, it's a combination of how much value you create and how much the people you're creating value for can pay for it. So there are jobs making things for rich people that very likely aren't as important as they look from the pay, and for anything involving getting paid by a government or charity that calculation is a bit complicated because the people paying aren't the people benefitting--which is why a lot of charity is just redistributing money from people who have more than they want to spend to people who don't have as much as they need. But I'm getting off-topic--neither of the jobs you're looking at have any of that kind of complication. Drone piloting pays more because fewer people can do it, so it's important that the ones who can have some incentive to choose that over jobs that more people can do."

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"...so you would say that drone piloting is more needed at this time, or at least for me in particular, than cleaning."

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"Yes."

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Then Kyeo will accept the drone piloting job and write a very weird email to the janitorial people.

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The janitorial people don't respond. The first couple weeks of the drone piloting job are mostly training, and it turns out not to conflict with the Pileup group's games.

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Then he will show up to Pileup and see how it is!

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It's pretty fun if you don't mind alternating between waiting and running around! There are about thirty people in the group, so they usually play fifteen-on-fifteen but occasionally arrange a match against another group and play thirty-on-thirty. The teams are randomly reassigned every day except that there are two people who are way better at it than everyone else and they're always on opposite teams.

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Huh, why do they randomize instead of having people on stable teams?

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If they had stable teams one team might win the vast majority of games and that would be less fun, also this way lets everyone get used to working together with everyone else which is fun and also helps with the games against other groups. Also if they has stable teams people might start having tribe-emotion about them and nobody wants that.

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...why does nobody want that?

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