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The Robots vs. Mrs. Patel

from Never Work by Ariel Sharratt & Mathias Kom

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jonathan barnard
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Aron Smith
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rustenskurk
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  • Buy the Full Digital Album

  • Limited Edition 12" Vinyl from BB*Island
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    12" vinyl, inky black as a capitalist heart. Complete with lyrics insert, so when you put it on the turntable in the staff break room you can sing along with your fellow workers while you conspire to hack the company's accounting system.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Never Work via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    As with all compact disc releases from our record label BB*Island, this one is perfectly round, but hidden inside high-quality square packaging—this time with beautiful collage and design work by Ariel. Within, you will also find a 12-page lyrics booklet, which includes every single word uttered by Ariel and Mathias (and Alexa) on the recording.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Never Work via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    PRE-ORDER, release Apr. 5th, ships end of March. This is a reprint of Never Work in Gold colored vinyl, incl. a new poster inlet with lyrics on the back.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Never Work via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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lyrics

The year was 2020, and the humans weren’t doing so well
For instance take the interesting case of Mrs. Anjuli Patel
She worked at the Easyday supermarket, which gave her no special enjoyment
It was not a good job, but it was a job, and she was grateful to have the employment

It was a Wednesday but to Mrs. Patel it was a workday just like any other
She was preoccupied thinking of how she felt guilty about not spending time with her mother
When she arrived at her workplace she stopped at the sight of something that glittered and gleamed
In place of her usual register was a shining self-checkout machine

Then out of her normally well-mannered mouth came words like fucking and hell
And that was the start of the terrible tale of the robots versus Mrs Patel

Well her boss was a pencil moustache with a pulse, his eyes traveled south like Vasco da Gama
And he leered and he jeered and he said with a sneer “Mrs P, let’s not have any drama,
This is Secure Checkout Auto-Bot 1000, SCAB 1000 if you prefer
You’ll be training our customers to use it, and dealing with problems that may occur”

Now Mrs. Patel thought of strangling him with the lanyard that held her ID card
But she needed the work even more since her husband lost his job as a security guard
And she was spending her evenings in night school, learning coding and programming skills
One day soon enough, she thought to herself, I’ll get off this wage slavery treadmill

So she opened SCAB 1000’s manual to page one, and thought to herself:
We’ll see who will win in this battle I call the robots vs. Mrs. Patel

Helping customers learn how to use the machines with which they would soon be replaced
Was an irony from which Mrs Patel and her colleagues found they just could not escape
Some plotted sabotage, some dreamed of a union, but Mrs Patel knew the truth
When robots and bosses find common causes there is nothing poor workers can do

Or that’s what she thought until one fateful evening in her late-night advanced coding class
When she learned about strategies known to the nerds as adversarial attacks
So she coded a way to trick the machines to check out items that didn’t exist
And to charge the fake shopping to her boss’s account before he knew what he’d missed

A little algorithm helped her bankrupt the system and the rest of the franchise as well
And in a way you could say that the robots joined forces with the hero called Mrs Patel

Now she’s revered as a binary Robin Hood throughout the subcontinent
The workers all dance in capital’s ashes and sing of her accomplishments
And she and her team of rebellious machines are redistributing the wealth
All you bosses and bankers had better beware of the robots and Mrs Patel

credits

from Never Work, released April 3, 2020

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The Burning Hell

The Burning Hell is the ongoing musical project of songwriter Mathias Kom and multi-instrumentalists Ariel Sharratt and Jake Nicoll, often including additional comrades and collaborators.

Their densely populated genre-shifting songs are packed with an abundance of literary, historical, cultural, and pop-cultural forebears, heroes and villains, subjects and objects, stories and hooks. ... more

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