The New and *Imporved FSA

One of the perks (perquisites being the original word) of this new job is the Vice and Virtue Flexible Spending Account, also known as a VVFSA or, popularly, a Sinning and Sainting FSA. We all get one. No other employer in the country (maybe the world) offers a VVFSA. They’re still working out some of the kinks of this innovation. As best as I can tell, this is how it works:

• Each employee starts with 1,000 Metaphysical Points (MPs) in their account.

• As with a stock exchange, the account value rises or falls in accordance with supply and demand. In this case, punishment and reward or good or bad are central to the algorithim.

• In any given calendar year, one’s account grows or diminishes in value as a result of the employee's contributed positive or negative impacts as determined by Human Resources (HR). (As of this writing, the impacts are confined both to the workspace and the hours of employment. However, remote work during the Coronavirus Pandemic has blurred these lines, and discussions are under way to amend the plan’s parameters.)

• Each employee is given a personal customized, confidential list of Positive Impacts (PIs) and Negative Impacts (NIs) at the end of each calendar year as an MP scoring sheet for the forthcoming year.

• The so-called cafeteria plan component of the Vice and Virtue FSA enables adherents to select in advance which impacts to be assigned a weighted value or which impacts to delete altogether in considering the MP annual total.

• The FSA essentially enables individuals to be reimbursed for virtues and charged for nonreimbursable vices as defined by HR.

• The “use it or lose it” feature of the VVFSA means that all 1,000 Metaphysical Points must be either spent during the calendar year or lost in perpetuity. The MPs can’t be rolled over into the next year.

• At year’s end, if an individual’s MP total is in arrears (e.g., in a state of moral depravity, beneath contempt, heinously solipsistic, Trumpian, egregiously GOP, sociopathically successful inter alia), HR will schedule an exit conference in the Tomas de Torquemada Conference Room in the sub-basement.

deus or dea ex machina

In case you didn't take four years of Latin in high school, the title of this blog post translates to "god or goddess out of the machine." Without googling it, if memory serves right the expression refers to a playwright's trick: to solve a plot dilemma the author injects a solution out of left field, as if a god or goddess had dropped out of the sky to make things right. Something like that. Close enough for my purposes. (I refuse to look it up while writing this. Go ahead. You're sure to look it up now, after this tease.) In this instance, the god or goddess in the machine is the notion of digital commands. I recently signed up with a food-delivery service. I installed an app on my phone and went through the required steps to be a valid delivery person seeking to make a few extra bucks at times of my own choosing. If I put myself on the clock, it makes me available for orders. I digitally inform the molecules or bits or bytes or electronic pulses -- I honestly don't know what -- residing in the app that I'm ready. The app knows where I am by GPS. If I receive a notification of a delivery order, I have 60 seconds to accept or decline the chance to go to the food merchant to pick up the food and then deliver it within a specified time to the person ordering the food and its delivery. A clock image in the upper-right corner of my phone screen starts ticking away the countdown. If I don't accept, someone else gets it. No pressure? Some pressure. Concurrent with this, I receive matching texts from the app. Messages like: "New Order: Go to XYZ (East Moses)." If I get to the food merchant and tarry in the parking lot, I start getting pestered by texts. Where are you? Choices are given, such as "waiting in line," "getting the food," "problem encountered," or "go fuck yourself." Yeah, yeah, I threw that in last one in there. Or if you accept the order and start driving, you might get a text saying something like, "You don't appear to be heading towards the order. Do you need help?" This annoys me because I know damn well where I'm going, thank you. If you fail to respond to an order -- typically because the app is frozen or acting up -- you are scolded. "You missed a delivery opportunity, which will now be offered to the next available PrancingReindeer." 

This digital hectoring wears me down. Who needs the cajoling, scolding, insinuating, needling, pressuring, belittling, and merciless nagging? Not to get too psychoanalytical about all this, but it dredges up the worst memories of growing up. It's a parental-memory nightmare-flashback. For the first time, today I encountered a fellow PrancingReindeer (my name for the delivery squad). He corroborated the woes I had encountered with the app. He was irate, ready to give up on this particular delivery vendor. 

But this person confirmed something I had been considering for a blog topic.

We treat the app like a person or persons.

He kept on using the personal pronoun "they" as he described his frustrations with the app. They said this, they did that, they told me this, they warned me about this, they didn't understand this.

I was thinking the same way.

Then a light bulb went off in my head.

"They" can't go fuck themselves because there is no "they."

I am learning to be calm when I am digitally hectored by the app by reminding myself there is no one behind the curtain, no Wizard of Oz. It is simply an algorithm or whatchamacallit responding to bits of data received or gleaned from me across the ether. It is very easy to think someone is twiddling their thumbs, timing us, watching us, waiting by the door ready to remonstrate us.

Surely the app has oceans of data on my timeliness, responsiveness, accuracy, speed, distance, heart rate, urinary frequency, attire, political views, browsing history, et cetera ad infinitum. And lakes of data are collected on the merchants and food merchants too. No doubt "they" know everything, and are using it to refine the app, I suppose.

But there is no person monitoring my delivery successes or failures. Is there?

It's all just automatically triggered prompts programmed in. 

Right? 

Are you sure?

round 'em up! . . . or down!

Some countries force buyers and sellers to round their commercial transactions up or down. There are lots of ways to implement cash rounding, depending on the local custom and the level of currency involved. For example, cash rounding might eliminate all coins or only designated fractions of a currency. Thus, $3.61 could be rounded up to $4.00 or it might be rounded down to $3.60. This technique, also known as Swedish rounding owing to its 1972 introduction in that Scandinavian nation, makes for simplicity and ease of use. I imagine it all sort of evens out in terms of income gained or lost. It must. After all, when an American taxpayer fills out the tax forms in April or earlier, the IRS does not require coin amounts, allowing those who file to round up or down. Tax software typically employs rounding.

Before going any further, let me say I love the Swedish word for "öre rounding": öresavrundning, though I'm not sure how to pronounce it. But I can hear its melodic lilt. Think of the öre as a penny in the United States, except that unlike the miserly penny it was discontinued in 2010. 

Now, as I am wont to do, let's jump to other roundingness situations.

Once upon a time, I went on a trip with two friends, one of them an engineer. We all decided to share expenses such as car rental, hotel, tolls, and gas. At the trip's conclusion, the engineer announced how much each person owed IN DOLLARS AND CENTS. Spare me! Or should I say, don't spare-change me! I objected then, and would now, that among friends we need not break it down into fractions of a dollar. What would one call this: Midwestern Reader's Digest Pecuniary Persnicketiness? I say that, although I confess to similar attributes as a fussy editor. But this is different. To me, it resonates with a moral exactitude rooted in the notion of a Fastidious Bookkeeper Omnipotent Being. 


What sort of person is ruled by such calculations? Does their viewpoint block any vision of the Incalculable? Or am I employing some sort of reverse superiority?

I am tempted to posit that select cultures foster such fastidiousness in daily affairs, not just regarding financial obligations. But that would invite the most prosaic and banal of stereotypes.

I hereby declare Round 'Em Up! 

Teachers and professors, round up the grades of your subjects.

Parents, round up the praises of your kids' accomplishments.

Police officers, round up the numbers on those Breathalyzer tests!

Law officers, round up the mph of cars whizzing by you! (I threw those last two in there for all those who figured I was going all soft and snowflaky on you.) 

Employers, round up the hourly wage of every minion mining profits for you.

For that matter, round down, too.

Dear Father Confessors, round down the sins and peccadilloes of your penitents.

Umpires, round down the strikes of the whiff artists at the plate.

Finally to all cable news pundits, analysts, consultants, moderators, anchors, and co-anchors: round down the decibels. 

Round down to zero. (Perfect for nihilists.)