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Four p.m. in Iloilo.
That's when Dublin wakes up.
I sit at desk 11 on the ninth floor of a tower in Mandurriao.
This floor used to hold 600 of us. Now there are fourteen.
We are the Human Line.
So picture a man in Cork who wants a loan.
The bot does all of it. The rate, the forms, the checks.
But the law says he can ask for a person.
So he says the words.
I want a human.
And his call comes to me.
I don't fix much. The bot already fixed it. Mostly I listen… and then I tell him yes, that's right, you can sign now.
My badge says Human Line Officer, Grade 3. My kids say I'm a professional witness.
They're not wrong.
Nineteen years ago, I worked nights.
I took billing calls from Ohio and Texas, 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. I was 33. I was good at it.
I could calm a man yelling about a late fee in under four minutes. They gave me a pin for that.
There were almost two million of us back then.
Two million Filipinos, wide awake while the rest of the country slept.
Then the bots got good.
Not all at once. First they took the easy calls. Password resets. Where's my box.
Then the medium ones. Then the angry ones… which I thought were mine forever.
The floor went quiet one row at a time.
My letter came in March 2031. I still have it.
It said my job was ending due to the installation of labor-saving devices.
Article 298 of the Labor Code. One month's pay for each year I worked. That was eleven months. Thirty days' notice.
Labor-saving. I laughed at that.
The device didn't save my labor. It just took it.
In other words… the law we had was built for a machine on a factory floor. Not for a machine that could talk back.
After that, I did a year of data tagging.
I taught the new models to hear Ilonggo. I taught them the gap between a joke and a threat.
In a small way, I trained the grandkids of the thing that took my desk.
Then the unions won the levy.
Every firm that swaps a person for a bot pays into the Displacement Fund. I get ₱9,400 a month from it, on top of my pay.
It is not enough. But it is not nothing.
I miss the noise. Six hundred headsets, all talking at once.
I miss 3 a.m. pancit in the pantry with my barkada.
I miss being needed ninety times a night.
But some things are better.
I eat dinner with my kids now. I sleep when it's dark.
My daughter can't remember when her mom was a ghost who slept all day.
And the callers are different. Nobody reaches me by mistake.
If they get me, they chose me.
Last week a widow in Galway asked me to read her the whole contract. Every line. It took forty minutes.
The bot could have done it in four seconds, in her own voice.
She didn't want her own voice.
She wanted mine.
At the end she said, Thank you, love. I just needed to know someone was there.
Someone is. For now. We'll see for how long.
Anyway. Dublin is calling.
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