In the early 1970s a receptionist called Sharon Atkins gazed into the future and hoped it would contain fewer people like her. “We’re going to have to find machines which can do that sort of thing,” she told the social historian Studs Terkel. “You’re wasting an awful lot of human power.” She felt shackled to the incessantly ringing phone. In snatches of time between calls, she wrote rambling letters, never posted, about how depressed she was. Her job was so routine she felt as she had been turned into “just a little machine”. “It’s really unfair to ask someone to do that.”
上世纪70年代初，一位名叫莎伦•阿特金斯(Sharon Atkins)的前台在憧憬未来时希望，将来像她一样人的会减少。“未来我们一定得造出能做这些工作的机器，”她对社会历史学家斯塔兹•特克尔(Studs Terkel)说，“这是对人力资源的极大浪费。”她感觉自己被响个不停的电话给绑架了。在接听电话的短暂间隙，她会写一些内容不着边际的长信，抒发她内心的压抑。不过，这些信件从未寄出过。她的工作都是些重复性琐事，她感觉自己已变成了“一台小小的机器”。“让人来做这样的工作真的很不公平。”