Astrid’s Calamitous Christmas Caper – page 9
Okay, before anybody gets their hopes up, I’m just gonna squash this right here: this is the closest we’re gonna get to seeing any of the main Far Out There characters in this series. Yeah, I’m doing stuff VERY differently this year, but darn it, I’m having fun!
Also, looking back over the dialog after having gone ahead and finished several more pages before going back to queue everything in one blast, I feel like part of the intended joke might have gotten lost. I wanted there to be an unspoken implication that people only showing up to try and work their way off The Naughty List are deliberately being given the most dreary, mind-numbing, borderline impractical jobs possible. Like, they’re not wanted anywhere near the more important jobs, but also that jobs like this would only exist in the first place because so many Naughty folk are showing up willing to do literally ANYTHING. That last bit in particular is probably waaay too obtuse to come across without somebody just flat out saying it… so I just flat out said it.
And, in keeping with the way large corporations and/or government bureaucracies usually work, at the end of the season Management will decide that the human double checkers sort process wasn’t necessary after all and toss all their results to go with the original automated screening algorithm’s original results instead.
Actually, there isn’t a reasonable reason to do that here. It would be adding costs and risk for no benefit. First of all, these human double checkers are all unpaid workers, so the only costs are the computers they already have and will likely effectively never need upgrades. As in, what’s being used could very easily be less of an actual computer and more of a terminal screen inside of the internal processing system.
Even if we ignore both of those things, the risk of hacking is too great for the automated system. The one benefit to the organization of all these “Naughty List” people checking everything seven to seventy times over is that any errors or hacking-based changed results WILL be found by someone.
Though, to be honest, I can see the Santa Corporation being in a troublesome position if someone came here to “remove themselves from the Naughty List”, only to take that information on other people on the Naughty List as blackmail material.
Blitz, you will need to have something to remove people’s memories of what happened here, or, given that you have shown images of the person being tested, have some level of false-information being presented to the checkers.
Well it’s not showing her name, just what her ID is in the system.
and as Blitz has pointed out, he only draws a limited number of different faces, so there’s probably trillions of people in the galaxy who look exactly like that. And most of them are probably Naughty. Ms. 357827557 could be anyone! 😉
It’s an isolated system, not connected to the Spaceinternet, thus no risk of external hacking, and it runs on special Northpolian technology that’s not compatible, so it can’t even surreptitiously be connected to the Spaceinternet. The only possible chance of hacking is if someone were to be so foolish as to give a bunch of Naughty People direct terminal access to the system, but of course, nobody’s crazy enough to do that….