Charade

This is a little story that popped into my head this afternoon.

Dave has a job in a factory / warehouse of some kind. He talks to his boss, Rich, by phone several times a day. The conversations are always very business-like to the point of being terse. Dave might tell Rich that the ten cases of fillupian widgets are ready for pickup, just like you ordered, and Rich would reply with 'good. Now we got 30 cases of undermonkeys coming in, they should be there tomorrow morning.' And Dave would say okay and they would both hang up. Rich works in another building on the other side of town, so they seldom see each other. Might be, since Dave has worked here for years, he might not even remember what Rich looks like. I mean, who cares anyway? They get our business done over the phone, they have no reason to see each other.

Now we have another guy, Jimmy who works in the factory / warehouse with Dave. Let's call it a warehouse. I'm not sure it makes any difference. We'll see how this plays out. Dave and Jimmy see each other throughout the day, every day. Only problem is, Jimmy and Rich are the same guy. Why is Jimmy pretending to be Rich? Or vice versa? I'm gonna leave that one alone for now.

It works because whenever Dave calls Rich, he goes inside a phone closet to shut off the ambient racket. While he's in there, Jimmy just has to turn the corner and he can be Rich and talk to Dave on the phone. But couldn't Dave tell that they were the same person from their voices? Well, some people are talented verbally and can produce different accents. That might work as long as your mark (Dave in this case) didn't see the wrong person use the wrong accent. He would have to see them. If he just heard them, he is going to assume the person who uses that accent is the one speaking. If he sees someone else speaking and using the wrong accent he is going to be flummoxed, to say the least.

There are also voice distorter gizmos, make you sound like anyone. There are also voice synthesizers. I hear them reading along with videos sometimes. Sometimes they even fool me for a minute or two. I imagine one that was taking input directly from a human speaker, either via keyboard or voice-to-text, could do better. Even without any other inputs other than the text, the pacing of the words could trigger pauses and the pauses could help with the inflection.

Let's say Jimmy has a voice distorter gizmo on his phone. All he has to do is press a button and his voice is becomes the voice of Rich, Dave's boss. Just remember when to press that button and when not to, Jimmy.

Now the news of ChatGPT comes along and Dave gets it in his head maybe Rich is a robot, a ChatGPT robot, and maybe not a real person at all. He tells this idea to Jimmy and Jimmy is all like wow, man, that's wild, where you'd get that idea? Nothing much comes of this, they just go on about their jobs. Days pass, maybe even a couple of weeks. 

Then one day while Dave is on the phone with Rich, Jimmy comes running by (and pauses to open the door and stick his head inside, if Dave's phone closet has a door. Maybe he has an office, maybe he just has a stand up desk out by the loading docks in the warehouse). Like I said, Jimmy comes running by and yells "Tell him Jimmy is screwing his wife", which if you think about is absolutely true, assuming Jimmy is happily married. To anyone besides Jimmy it is going to sound like flagrant adultery.

Now Rich isn't there, he hears someone yell in the background, although it might be hard to hear over your own voice. Anyway, he has to decide how much he wants to hear. Did he just hear some indistinct yelling in the background? Or did he hear every word clearly and distinctly? Or somewhere in between. He can choose whatever he wants.

Dave gets to try and negotiate a social minefield. What did I hear? What did Rich hear? WTF is going on? He turns to face Jimmy when Jimmy sticks his head in the door and yells and he's been watching him walk away since. Jimmy's normal move at this point is turn the corner so he is out of sight, but he doesn't. Instead he just turns and continues his conversation with Dave. Dave's watching him and can see he is talking on the phone but can't hear him. After a bit he notices that Jimmy is speaking when Rich is speaking.

Does Rich reveal that he is Jimmy, or vice versa? Or does Jimmy go around the corner in order to maintain the charade?