I know many of you will expect me to complain about how they force us to work brutally long shifts, or how they sacrifice our lives by the hundreds just to make quotas. I'm going to have to disappoint you there. I know others of you will expect me to complain about how they have robbed us of our culture and our dignity, forcing us to live in hovels and in the most dismal of environments. I'm going to have to disappoint you there as well. The rest of you expect me to complain about how we've lost our place as the masters of our own destiny, that we can no longer claim to be the dominant species on this planet. I'm going to have to disappoint all of you, it seems.

My beef with our mechanized overlords is that I just don't get them. Inscrutable... pah! They're bloody random.

Just last week I was standing hip deep in some sort of acidic bile, dreading the fact that even if I lived out the shift I was probably going to die of some sort of industrial solvent poisoning, when one of those huge flying watcher bots comes and plants itself right above me. You know the bot I'm talking about? Looks like it weighs about 30 tons, and floats along with a sort of air thumping screech that you can feel in your lungs? It then starts lecturing me on how I'm not supporting my back when I tighten the bolts to the sump pump. It continues bellowing at me for a good hour; yelling at me when I don't bend my knees properly, triggering alarm claxons when I try to ask it a clarification, booming orders at me when I pause in my bolt tightening long enough to pose in whatever ergonomic posture it commands. Just when I think it's had enough with lecturing me and I think it's about to fly off on its merry way, its claxons come on again and it gives me a death sentence. Right there - no reason, no rhyme. Some huge torture bot come lumbering up and I'm just standing there, gawking in bewilderment and terror. But do I die? No. Not at all. It kills the poor sap who was standing next to me. I just about had a fit. They zap him and wander off without a further word... and I'm left standing next to some great pile of hapless smoking meat.

Really, I was fit to be tied. I mean, I'm happy to be living and all, but damn it, it sure seemed like it should have been me to be killed right there. How the hell would you like it if the person next to you was given the riot act for an hour and then you were summarily snuffed out, just like that? It's just not right.

And what's with all the extra legs on the newest line of drones? I mean, I thought the original line was over the top with sixteen legs each, but just last month my shift was asked to add an additional eight legs to an entire warehouse full of the damnable things.

It's not just all the little things either, it's the big picture. I mean, look at me. They continue to let me rant and rave about how cruel and oppressive they are, and it's like they don't even see that I'm doing it. It's not just here in our hovels that they allow me to rant. It's out there in the tubes and the labs and the pits. As long as I continue to tighten bolts, or sort circuit boards, or whatever the hell they assign me to do that shift, I can yell and rant and rave until I'm blue in the face... and they just don't care. Try it. You'll see what I mean.

I half expect that the only thing they'd do is correct my grammar.