Joseph, a sheepish white man in his early thirties, was much less chummy than Aditya, and lived in seeming mortal terror of offending the older Filipina moderators, so quick was he to acquiesce when they blandly refused to do some task he'd been sent down by management to deliver. He let them smoke in the stairwells, turned a blind eye to the employees who fucked in the wellness studios, and never said anything when he caught them bingeing Netflix on their secondary computer monitor, provided they met their targets on the first. With his stretched earlobes, he seemed like he should have been serving specialized coffee flights at a café in Portland, so how he'd stumbled into content moderation was a bit of a mystery to everyone. Joseph had mentioned that he'd worked at a doomed start-up, some type of augmented reality app, but the only real thing he said about his experience was one single solemn proclamation, after some of the moderators complained about the off-brand candy bars in the breakroom: 'The first sign a start-up is going to fail is if the snacks are expensive.'

'But we're not a start-up,' Rhea pressed. Joseph deflated. Some of the branded candy bars came back. Girlie liked Joseph just fine.