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Cashier #43 was not smiling enough. I called her into my office.

“But, Mr. Pruffer, I was smiling,” she said. “I really was. Whenever a customer came up to my register, I smiled just like the manual says to do. I showed my teeth and everything. I lifted the corners of my mouth.”

“That’s not what the facial expression cognition software is telling us,” I said. “The reports have been very clear for several days. Over the course of the twenty-seven documented Customer Interface Junctures it rates your facial expression at a median of five out of ten, which is really somewhere between a wan look of apology and a grimace, rather than a smile. That is extremely sub par.”

Her name was Gladys Kemp. She stood in the middle of the floor in front of my desk, silent, her eyes cast down, her lips pursed as though she were holding something inside her mouth that kept trying to escape. She looked like she was in her mid-thirties. She had the first faint tracings of lines around her eyes, the blue shadows of tiredness beneath, but these things somehow only called attention to the melancholy prettiness of her face. She still wasn’t saying anything.

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