Promising a Good Time
Damn it, I told the higher-ups that this experience was not ready for order. Our company assures excellent quality for its hired bot services, but this was a rush-job and it showed.
People hire us for all kinds of events, bachelor parties, club openings, anywhere you need star-power. With our collection of hyper-realistic robots, your favorite athlete, celebrity, or model can be there to hype up the crowd and promise a good time.
But when the company received the contract for the Bachelorette party, they focused on the potential dollar signs and not the request itself. To be fair, no one could've expected the huge popularity of the show 'Heated Rivalry', so we didn't even plan on making models for the characters or the actors who portrayed them. But the client fell head over heels for the main lead, Hudson Williams, and we promised to provide.
There was only a month before the job. Typically, it takes a good three months to accurately manufacture one of our blank bots into the man or woman of the client's desires, with another month to hire an operator to study and learn the persona's traits for seamless performance. As head of the project, I was under a lot of pressure to make it happen. We couldn't just start from scratch - it would take too long for the conversion - so we had to make do with what was already in the warehouse. The team did their best with the time crunch, recycling an old 'young Keeyanu Reeves' bot that hasn't been ordered in years. They had a similar enough facial structure and height, so the majority of the fabrication was simulating his muscular hockey athelete-esque build. Still, we didn't fully have the time to fix him up with all the details of the real actor, hence why 'Hudson' had to wear his shades even indoors to hide the fact that the eye structure was different from the real deal. Luckily, his clothes were easy enough to proquire, as our Harry Styles bot had a huge closet to pick from.
The operator they gave us also didn't help the situation. Danny ,in real life, was this geeky theater kid right out of college. It was increasingly hard to find people willing to do the job for the pay and confidentiality demanded by the company. The bot would do a majority of the work with the voice replicator and built-in dance move, with Danny really there for interacting and custom minute locomotion. But even as he test ran the model, I had a feeling this wouldn't go swimmingly.
The real issues showed up during the event itself. I was at point with Danny in the company-owned van. That's where the operator stayed connected to the mental link controlling the bot like a remote control puppet, all the while 'Hudson' was inside the venue entertaining. Because we had so little time and the bot itself was not well-crafted, there were so many times it would spasm, lag in its movements, or fully shut down, much to the confusion of the party-goers. Danny, untrained in how to act during these situations, would often shy away, going against the cool and confident attitude of Shane Hollander in the show. By the end of the night, I could tell the client's feedback survey would not be positive.
Overall, it was not my fault for the lackluster event, but hopefully it'll be a lesson for the higher-ups making the deals. Before promising a good time, consider the work needed to be done.
