The Last Network - Chapter 38
Omar’s Army
Rabbit stood behind the one-way mirror and looked out at the sea of cubicles. The first third was filled with agents. They had their VR glasses on, trolling away. Beside Rabbit, the Sams were looking at a dashboard that monitored and aggregated everything taking place on the floor.
“Ok, are you ready to watch the team in action?” Omar asked.
“Let’s see what you got.” Rabbit rubbed his hands together.
Omar turned on a bank of monitors. He rigged it to see into any agent’s VR stream and watch their Pair in action. He brought a session onto the big monitor.
“What are we doing?” a woman asked.
“We are going to the subway to beg for money,” Agent Vargas replied.
“Why?”
“Because I’m poor and I need to practice panhandling. How can I get better if I can’t practice? Now let’s head over to that dumpster. We need to find a cardboard box to make a sign with.”
The screen went black as the woman dropped the call. Omar selected another from the queue.
“Stand-up?” a man asked.
“Yes, it’s open mic night. I’ve got some new jokes that I want to test out,” Agent Cameron replied.
“You’re a comedian?”
“Well, sort of. I’m actually an oncologist, but at night I like to do comedy. These new jokes are going to kill. You like dad jokes, right?”
“Can you tell me one?”
“Not until you are up onstage. I want it to be fresh for you when you deliver the line.”
It went black again. A moment later Omar switched to another agent.
“Here’s the CVS. What happens next?” a woman asked.
“So, here’s the thing. Last week I slept with a guy I shouldn’t have. We live in a small town where everybody knows everyone, including the pharmacist. Now I’m worried that this guy might have given me the clap, but I can’t go to my drugstore because then it will get back to my mom and well, he’s her ex-boyfriend. So, I need you to go and describe my symptoms to them and get a diagnosis.” Agent Diaz answered.
Rabbit chortled as the screen went black and another came online.
“You what?” a man asked.
“I can’t go to lunch with a woman who is not my wife. It’s against my beliefs. The thing is, she’s done a lot of really great work at the office and it’s her last day on the job. So, I need you to take her to lunch as me.” Agent Hernandez answered.
“This is too weird.”
Omar hit the mute button and turned to Rabbit, a huge smile across his face.
“What do you think?” Omar asked Rabbit.
“I think it’s a fucking riot. How many of these are you doing?”
“Each rep averages 4.7 Pairs an hour. On any given day, we’ve got 120 seats full and they are logged in for seven hours, so we do about 4000 pairs a day. We measure them on drop rate after one minute. To be successful, an agent needs to get 80% of their Pairs to go for at least one minute and then have the other party drop the session.”
“What happens if the other side doesn’t hang up?”
“We give them ten minutes, then if it’s still going, our reps start getting weirder and more annoying. If someone won’t hang up after fifteen minutes, we assume they are fucking with us and we drop the session.”
“How often does that happen?” Rabbit asked.
“We get maybe a hundred a day. Our people are very good at being awkward.”
“Any difference between Together and Rizon?”
“Together users are easier to scare off. It’s more mainstream, they have fewer defenses. The Rizon guys are used to trash talking and people saying weird shit from video games. We get less of them, but they are a tougher crowd. I think we’ll need to switch our tactics with them. I’ve got some of our bros cooking up a playbook.”
“Good. I want to take Together down first. You keep hammering them, Omar.”
They left the facility and began the drive back into town. The Sams sat together in the backseat, a laptop resting between them.
“Looks like Sonny and Omar did a good job,” Rabbit said.
“By appearances, yes,” Guy Sam said.
“What’s your assessment?” Rabbit asked, his eyes darting up at the rearview mirror.
“Too soon to tell. Our program will take in stats from Omar’s agents. It also crawls the profile pages on both sites and checks the last login date for every Together and Rizon user. We’ll use that to develop an abandonment rate. Once that’s in place, all we need to do is compare and contrast churn rates. We look at people who have paired with someone in Omar’s Army vs. those who haven’t. The expectation is that talking to an Omar agent will lead to a much higher churn rate. If churn is the same and the agents are not scaring people off, then we’ll need to abandon the program. If they are successful, then we need to do some forecasting,” Girl Sam said.
“To see if we can pull this off,” Rabbit said.
“Right. It’s one thing to be able to scare users away. It’s another to create a bad enough reputation that the service fails. Getting from the former to the latter is a matter of figuring out the key variables. How fast does Together grow? How much money do they spend to get those users? How cheaply can we run them off the site?”
“Well, I’ve got you two to figure out the quantitative. Qualitatively though, that shit was a riot. I told Omar to start posting the best ones on YouTube.”
“Yes, they are very amusing,” Guy Sam said.
Rabbit looked in his rearview and watched the two of them go back to the laptop. He regretted not taking Omar up on his offer of dinner and drinks. Next trip he’d leave the square twins at home and plan on having a good time. Despite the downers in back, he felt great about this decision. His gut had told him to own America. He had failed there, but it led him to a plan for stopping his rivals. That was life up on the wire.