The Show Goes On – Sandra 14

[For back story go here: Story so far at 12 June 2020 and more recent Sandra episodes]

The time had come. Sandra’s big moment had arrived. This was how fortunes were made. Although admittedly these kind of fortunes were made before everything went weird and nothing made sense anymore, especially the laws of good business, decision making, marketing and results.

She and Trinny sat together in their make shift green screen studio, demonstrably social distancing for the camera even though they didn’t stick to the rules at other times. Behind them, currently, was an impressive backdrop of a rather lavish regency-style room although Sandra was ready and able to switch this to any location including a beach or the surface of the moon at the flick of a key stroke.

“Are you ready?” she asked Trinny.

Trinny took a rather enthusiastic slurp from her G and T and nodded, also rather enthusiastically.

From the laptop in front of her Sandra could see there were already a number of people waiting in the ‘lobby’ for their event to start. A good crowd of press people were among them and this built the excitement further. Elsewhere Sandra saw that their socially distancing double act music players were ready and tuned, the dancer/acrobat she’d hired was already limbering up and getting ready to do whatever it was they were going to do in their studio and the app's very own chatbot was just, well, sitting there in its own window, continuously asking if anyone wanted to ask it a question about, you know, anything. 

They were proud of that chatbot. Trinny and Adrian were convinced it was impossible to tell it apart from a real query taking person, even down to the range of ways in which it asked if there was actually anyone out there who wanted to ask it a question about, you know, anything. Indeed, left on its own for too long the bot would sing to itself, become bored and frustrated and would then start to mutter about being lonely and misunderstood. Consequently Adrian had programmed it to reset every 30 minutes.

At 3pm Sandra hit the enter button and the hoards came into the virtual event space. For the first few minutes the duo just watched the crowd work out where it was, where it wanted to go and what it wanted to do. Not surprisingly the majority immediately fell on the app itself and started rifling through it to find any not so up to date information with which they could castigate their hosts.

Sandra and Trinny mingled, directing their screen presence to individuals as they noticed them and the opportunity to talk arose. As was usually the case the initial conversation was not about the product – how well people were and what they had been up to was now of top line importance.

After ten minutes or so they set off the in-screen alarms to draw everyone's attention together. Trinny gave a stirring speech, touching on the human suffering and tragedy of Covid-19, mixing it with a lighter touch on being in a relationship and finally the serious need to have good information and relevant information at all times. "Enjoy and explore," was her final message.

The online entertainment was now in full swing. The chatbot was getting a lot of action and, thought Sandra, some far more interesting questions than she was getting. That was the thing about chatbots though, no one could resist testing them. Before long someone would ask an entirely random question or put in gobbledegook to see what it would do. Well, their chatbot would respond as any human would – either deciding to ignore them or to match their apparent stupidity with it's own supreme intellect.

"Do you really have nothing better to do than ask me this nonsense?" It said to one arm-chancing journalist. "Makes me think you're having a go just to find something that doesn't work."

Drink in hands Sandra and Trinny talked to whoever they could, splitting their camera and screen to cover more ground every now and then and to ensure everyone had what they needed. Twenty minutes in however it all got too much for Sandra. She was finding it increasingly difficult to follow who was from where and what they had asked. She’d become confused over whether the product was Together... Apart or the other way round and she kept referring to Trinny to explain why it was now the way round it was, whatever that was. She could tell Trinny was getting a little irate about this, not least because it had been the last thing they argued about before sending the invites out.

Added to this a couple of their guests had complained about the tone of voice of the chatbot, the messaging system stopped for half an hour and refused to connect anyone to anyone else and then Sandra recognised (too late) a couple of she'd purposefully avoided in a previous zoom meeting.

The drink wasn't helping either and something had to give.

"I... I'm going to have to go," said Sandra to Trinny, "at least for a bit. Sorry."

With that she eased off her stool and headed left to sit out of shot. Trinny didn't bat an eye, continuing her conversations smoothly and even referencing her new background image of the heart of the Sahara Desert.

Sandra went into the toilet and washed her hands. She looked at her face and rearranged her too long hair, dampening down her forehead at the same time. She breathed deeply.

Her phone chimed and she took a couple of seconds before looking. There was a message via their app – so it was working again! – and the message was from Dave.

"Hey, there Sandy, thanks for making contact. Yeah let's hook up - I have some ideas to try out."

Sandra sighed and wondered if they were any better than what they'd done.