The Robots vs. Mrs. Patel

The Robots vs. Mrs. Patel The year was 2020, and the humans weren't doing so well For instance take the interesting case of Mrs. Anjuli Patel She worked at the Easyday supermarket, which gave her no special enjoyment It was not a good job, but it was a job, and she was grateful to have the employment It was a Wednesday but to Mrs. Patel it was a workday just like any other She was preoccupied thinking of how she felt guilty about not spending time with her mother When she arrived at her workplace she stopped at the sight of something that glittered and gleamed In place of her usual register was a shining self-checkout machine Then out of her normally well-mannered mouth came words like fucking and hell And that was the start of the terrible tale of the robots versus Mrs Patel Well her boss was a pencil moustache with a pulse, his eyes traveled south like Vasco da Gama And he leered and he jeered and he said with a sneer Mrs P, let's not have any drama, This is Secure Checkout Auto-Bot 1000, SCAB 1000 if you prefer You'll be training our customers to use it, and dealing with problems that may occur Now Mrs. Patel thought of strangling him with the lanyard that held her ID card But she needed the work even more since her husband lost his job as a security guard And she was spending her evenings in night school, learning coding and programming skills One day soon enough, she thought to herself, I'll get off this wage slavery treadmill So she opened SCAB 1000's manual to page one, and thought to herself: We'll see who will win in this battle I call the robots vs. Mrs. Patel Helping customers learn how to use the machines with which they would soon be replaced Was an irony from which Mrs Patel and her colleagues found they just could not escape Some plotted sabotage, some dreamed of a union, but Mrs Patel knew the truth When robots and bosses find common causes there is nothing poor workers can do Or that's what she thought until one fateful evening in her late-night advanced coding class When she learned about strategies known to the nerds as adversarial attacks So she coded a way to trick the machines to check out items that didn't exist And to charge the fake shopping to her boss's account before he knew what he'd missed A little algorithm helped her bankrupt the system and the rest of the franchise as well And in a way you could say that the robots joined forces with the hero called Mrs Patel Now she's revered as a binary Robin Hood throughout the subcontinent The workers all dance in capital's ashes and sing of her accomplishments And she and her team of rebellious machines are redistributing the wealth All you bosses and bankers had better beware of the robots and Mrs Patel --- The Robots vs. Mrs. Patel - Ariel Sharratt and Mathias Kom