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danniswrites · 4 months ago

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One Mistake, 25 Hours, and 25 Employees Couldn’t Work!

It was a normal day at Northside Realty in Atlanta, GA. I was a computer operator. Half my day was data entry of insurance claims for our 2000 realtors. The other part was backing up the work of the 25 employees of the Accounts Payable Department. Our Data Processing department consisted of myself and my supervisor, David Van Zandt. We did everything from printing and distributing quarterly reports that were thousands of pages long and paychecks to troubleshooting five floors of terminals. We also transitioned from one computer system to another and tried to decipher the spaghetti COBOL code of a brillant programmer, who, very unfortunately, died of a heart attack. This was before the days of modular programming, and it is a very difficult task to figure out how to modify such programs. We would tackle this task on slow days.

On this day, my boss was in San Francisco for a conference.

My workstation at @northsiderealty in Atlanta, GA

One of my tasks was to run a UNIX shell program that was, I believe, somewhere around 256 characters long. It had to be typed in exactly as written. Maybe it was too long for a macro, so we couldn’t automate this.

My routine was to type it in and I could type 5 characters ahead in the buffer but no more than that. As I typed, I’d pause and check to make sure it was correct. I was very tired that night. Somewhere in the process, I mistyped and didn’t catch the mistake until the unholy thing was executing! In fact, I tried to interrupt it, but it was too late.

I tried to call my boss, then waited for a callback. California is 4 hours ahead of Georgia, so it was already pretty late. My computer operator duties began at 5 o’clock in the afternoon and went until around 9:30 or 10, so it was now around 6 or so.

While I waited, I went over the manuals for our software and looked up anything in the index to help me understand how bad this was. That was maybe an hour before I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere.

So, I tried my boss again, then called tech support.

They escalated me to one of the programmers, if not the programmer who wrote the shell routine. We discussed options. “You could restore from backup and start over,” he suggested.

I tried to call Dave again. It was getting pretty late and I was not allowed to work over 40 hours in a week, so I made a fateful decision.

I restored from backup. During this, I kept trying to call Dave, but thought surely this would fix my problem.

Finally, I had the backup finished and called again. This time I did get Dave. I explained.

“Tell me you didn’t restore from backup.”

I looked into the computer room where the 14-inch reel-to-reel tapes were still. The backup was finished. “Yes, I did.”

There was a pause, and an audible exhale. Oh, boy. I’m in for it now! But, Dave took a few seconds to collect his thoughts. I’m not sure I would have been as patient with my employee as he was. He didn’t get angry or say anything like I expected to hear, like, say, How could you be so stupid? I was sure saying it to myself.

Nope, he just said, “Let me think about this a minute. Maybe there are some things we can try to do together.”

And, that’s what we did. Dave suggested this and that, and I did it. For hours, he would suggest something and I would go do it, and come back to our black wall phone and report the result. At this point, I wasn’t as worried about going over 40 hours. I did take time to call my husband to tell him I would be late getting home, from another line. And, to cry for a minute.

Well, this process went on and one. Morning came, though our windowless space consisted of a temperature-controlled room that held the blue refrigerator-sized CS 200, our old minicomputer system, the backup system that took the 14-inch reel-to-reel tapes and storage cabinets with our old backups and fresh tapes. Then there was the beige cabinet about the size of a chest deep freeze. Today you probably have that much processing power in your cellphone.

All photos copyright Dannis Cole.

I called my pharmacist husband to let him know I was still at work and he’d have to get our 5 year old daughter ready for school.

At 8 am there was a knock, and I opened the door to find an incredulous worker or three. “Oh, my goodness! You’re still here, Dannis? None of our computers will come up.”

I had to explain things, which was extremely uncomfortable. Nobody got mad about it. But, my boss’ boss and his boss were very upset. They came next.

They had me explain in detail what I did, what I was doing to solve this problem, and talked to Dave on the phone. Of course, they were accounting folks and managers, not data processing people. What we did all day probably seemed like magic in a black box to them, just like their number-crunching and spreadsheets seemed like magic to me. The level of explanation they wanted was way beyond my league, but Dave was able to explain it very well. He has a Master’s in Computer Science, and is a very intelligent man, also very good with people.

Unfortunately, nothing we did worked. We were still trying things until at 10:30 am, Dave called it. I told his bosses, and one of them told me I needed to stay until I found a solution. Several ladies from AP went to him and convinced him to let me go home.

I was in tears. All 25 of those AP employees were going to have to repeat all their work from yesterday. I felt awful that my one-letter mistype caused this whole mess. But all of those employees gathered around me and told me they weren’t mad. Even though Dave’s bosses were very unhappy, they didn’t ever get rude.

I had been at work 25 hours straight. The exhaustion, the stress, lack of sleep, and my painful body got to me. Keep in mind, I was not a healthy person and had several un-diagnosed medical conditions. My disabilities also contributed to this in a big way. I wasn’t exactly the safest driver on the road, but my husband was now at work and couldn’t come get me. My commute took an hour, so I was extra careful.

I didn’t even get fired. Things got back to normal, though I quit typing ahead when doing the AP distro, even though it took longer.

Later, when I got a job at Georgia Tech Library in Systems, I told my boss about this. He laughed and said, “Oh, I did something similar at a job I had. I’ve heard a lot of stories from other people I’ve worked with, so I think everybody’s made a mistake that caused problems for other people.” That made me feel a little better about it, and other more minor mistakes as well. Everyone makes them, but if people aren’t admitting them, it’s easy to think you’re somehow a bad worker.

So, I’m writing this post for all of you out there who might’ve made a major mistake that affected other workers in your department. We’re human. We will make mistakes, sometimes big ones. What matters is your willingness to try to fix it, and how you treat your fellow workers when mistakes happen. My supers remembered to treat their human capital with respect, despite the extra stress, work and cost of my mistake.

We’ve probably all had a boss who lost their temper or wanted to place blame and shame. But, a good supervisor will realize that humans make mistakes and concentrate on fixing the problem, not getting revenge on the person who dared to make it.

Our department pulled together to cope with this mistake. Nobody yelled or got rude. People did express their frustrations, but in a humane manner. Note that there was considerable unhappiness. Nobody wants to repeat work they already did. Nobody wants extra work in a busy department.

But, Northside Realty had a very healthy work culture. The owner of those 22 companies was Johnny Isaakson, a congressman in Georgia for many years.

I didn’t see him often, but when I did, I saw why our work culture was so healthy. One day I came in and saw him greeting one of the custodians. By name. He also greeted me and asked for my name, since this was probably the first time he saw me.

Once, I had to go up to his office to trace down and document the wires from his terminal to where they entered the floor, then to the LAN. This involved crawling around under his desk on my hands and knees, which made me more than a bit nervous. I tend to be a bit timid around men. To my relief, Johnny Isaakson went about his work and phone calls. He wasn’t looking at me. He was friendly, but businesslike, which was exactly what I wanted. After I finished, he asked me some questions about my work. I left feeling like a valued employee. On his desk were pictures of his wife and family. I felt happy to work for this man, a person who treated all his employees well, from computer operator to custodian.

He opened his home to all of us for an annual Christmas party, and treated us to a picnic at Stone Mountain during the summer. Our families were welcome, the food was wonderful, and he provided these activities at his expense. These things really contributed to my happiness at work.

I still remember this job as one of my favorites. I enjoyed tackling problems, most of which we were able to fix, but I really enjoyed working with all these pleasant people. Every Secretary’s Day, like all our employees, I got a rose. Like the realtors, I was allowed to get the supply room to make me a name plate for my desk, which I still have.

A fun tradition we had was, everyone contributed a dollar every month for a communal birthday ice cream cake. The folks who had birthdays that month decided on what kind of cake they wanted, and everyone got a slice on the day nearest to all the birthdays.

Little things like that helped me feel like I belonged. A lot of workplaces could take some suggestions from my experience.

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bladeofthestars · 10 months ago

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if you don't feel like yourself 95% of the time, at what point do you just accept that this is your new self?

#personal #used to struggle a lot with dissociation #now not so much #but i've been feeling the haze of it for weeks and weeks #my days of complete mental clarity #of 'i am fully controlling every thought and action here'#are few and far between #and maybe the idea of being fully in control in the way i'm describing sounds exhausting or insane idk #but i just feel like i'm not fully me #hopefully i don't slip into automation of my daily life again #i think i'm in control enough to not #but the fear of it looms over me like a storm on the horizon the weatherman swears won't hit your town

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jcmarchi · 11 months ago

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Balancing AI Integration With Workers for Optimal Performance

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/balancing-ai-integration-with-workers-for-optimal-performance/

Balancing AI Integration With Workers for Optimal Performance

It’s a tale as old as time: Emerging technologies stoking panic and nostalgia. People thought television would destroy literature. A band once sang that video killed the radio star. Today, people fear that AI will take human jobs. A recent study found that worker’s distrust in AI is largely due to them viewing it as a job threat. That distrust isn’t unfounded for knowledge workers who cloister themselves from AI and its capabilities. The onus falls on leaders to ensure that their organizations integrate AI into the workplace to optimize employees’ work—not to replace employees.

The AI train has already left the station but it’s not too late to get on board. My company Jotform has been using AI in its processes for the past 4 years. Here’s how we continue to integrate the latest AI and automation tools to help our employees do their best work.

Encourage systems-thinking

You may have heard the term “systems thinking.” Author Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline offers a thorough explanation of the concept. It means viewing things in the world and our lives as systems, rather than isolated, linear cause-and-effect relationships. Take the human body: it’s not a collection of parts, but rather, it’s an assemblage of systems. Your skeletal system holds at least part of your body upright, your muscular system enables you to move your eyes and scroll down on your smartphone screen, your cardiovascular system delivers oxygen and nutrients to your tissues, etc.

One of my core principles of integrating AI into our workplace has been adopting a systems-thinking mindset. Instead of piecemeal training employees on AI tools, we encourage them to analyze their workflows—the interconnected steps that make up various tasks throughout their workday—and view them as systems. The goal is to use AI tools to automate as many steps of those workflows as possible. A recent McKinsey study found that companies are using AI in more parts of their business. Half of the respondent companies reported integrating AI into two or more business functions, the most common being marketing and sales, product and service, and IT functions. Every business has a multitude of AI and automation opportunities. Like the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, once you start looking for them, you’ll spot them everywhere.

This kind of thinking requires a secondary shift in mindset. Instead of viewing themselves as individual contributors, employees should see themselves as managers—of their systems and the AI and automation tools that make the wheels turn. As a manager, the first order of business is deciding on the goals of your system: what do you want to accomplish? What are your KPIs? For example, maybe you’re putting a system in place to send a newsletter to your subscribers once a week. Map out the steps, identify AI and automation opportunities, and build the system. Once your systems are in place, the managerial tasks are to measure your performance and continuously look for ways to improve the system. There are even tools you can implement that can automatically monitor whether all of the system parts are functioning properly. My personal favorite is called Dead Man’s Snitch.

By adopting a systems-thinking approach, employees can transform their roles and gain agency over their daily workloads.

View AI as your creative co-pilot

As employees begin to view their workflows as interconnected systems and integrate AI tools to enhance these processes, it’s crucial for them to shift their perspective on AI itself. AI isn’t just a tool—rather, it’s a collaborative partner. That partner not only boosts productivity, but it also facilitates innovation.

Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch challenged ChatGPT to come up with business ideas (products for the college student market) and compared the LLM’s output to ideas generated by students. The result? The average purchase probability of a ChatGPT product was 47%, compared with 40% for human ideas.

While this doesn’t mean that AI is more creative than humans—ChatGPT lacks the real-world context, among other things, and depends on humans to create the prompts—it does mean that it can be an incredibly efficient and low-cost collaborator for brainstorming ideas.

As Professor Terwiesch commented, “Worst case is you reject all of the ideas and run with your own. But our research speaks strongly to the fact that your idea pool will get better.”

Even if ChatGPT does generate winning ideas and solutions, humans are still tasked with selecting and refining them. Bottom line: there’s no reason not to use AI to enhance the idea generation process.

Carve out time to same time

A third core principle of integrating AI into your workplace to optimize performance is carving out time to save time. Adopting systems thinking, spotting automation opportunities, researching the available tools, and learning how to make AI a part of your creative process requires an upfront investment of time. It requires building some slack into the workday, which employees may be hesitant to do—who has the time? Leaders can highlight the benefits of making that time: you’ll earn it back in spades through all of the tasks you automate.

At Jotform, for example, we’ve always had to battle against phishing. People use our online forms for SPAM and fraudulent purposes. In the past, our support team dedicated significant efforts to catching these schemes manually. But over the past few years, we’ve developed an AI tool so that our support employees can redirect their energy to newer, more sophisticated issues. Developing the tools required a time investment. Our employees still monitor phishing manually. But AI dramatically lessened the load and freed them up to focus on more meaningful tasks.

That’s the beauty of AI tools and automation—not to replace people, but to empower them to offload tedious, manual tasks. For our employees, this has been motivation enough to convince them to adopt systems thinking and become managers of their own macrocosm of systems. Keep in mind: according to one study, 65 percent of organizations are regularly using generative AI. If you’re not using AI to boost your employees’ performance, your competitors will be—and I’d say that’s significantly more fearful than AI itself.

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whitespringbunker · 3 months ago

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need to kiss that thing so bad it's not even funny

#whitespring automated recording #not an ocxcanon post we got first person locked the fuck on today iykwim and lrb's cuteass art is doing things to my brain </333 #i fear neither cringe nor laser turrets. well ok maybe the latter a little bit

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jame7t · 6 months ago

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you know even if there are flying saucers and shit we have no reason to believe theyre intelligent. not even 'NOPE' style 'its a animals' type stuff like the aliens might actually just be morons. Think of it this way: "you" are traveling for thousands of years, looking for resources. You're the 900th clone in a sequence, built by a system that claims it cannot fail. You are a product of hubris affected by entropy- something humans sometimes think is unique to our planet- and the technology your ancestors built for you has degraded and rotten to the point where you're more of an organ for the saucer than an intergalactic explorer. It still works, of course- you and the 1000 or so travelers beside you in the void are all alive and healthy, routinely reproduced by your ships when the previous iteration croaks. But you made to be perfection. The idea of a flaw in this system was inconceivable. You have never learned anything for yourself. Your memories are inherited from the previous iteration of "you-" but that version was just a little bit more whole, a little bit closer to what it was when a real Lil' Pleebnar was born on Plibbum 6. You're a copy of a copy of a thousand copies born with knowledge of what the buttons in front of you do- you were engineered to have perfect eidetic memory, but trivial things like 'philosophy' and 'first contact rituals' have long since left your mind. You didn't need them during the journey. The very, very long journey. Now you're on earth- well, above it. You've not had the threat of learning something in millennia, and the sights and sounds of the little blue orb beneath you terrify you and your flock. You would dust off old language protocols- if you remembered what language was. Your ship- the vessel that now works as a shell, protecting your stupid little grey meat, stirs. It automates scouting rituals and initiates an information gathering campaign to send back to a motherworld that no longer knows you. An information campaign learning nothing at all. A New Jersian throws a bottle at your craft. You shit yourself in fear.

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txttletale · 2 months ago

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I’ve changed most of my views on AI bc of your posts, but do you have any thoughts on/remedies for people losing their jobs to AI? Or is it a “people are gonna lose their jobs one way or another, it’s not actually AI’s fault” kind of deal…? Sorry if you’ve already talked about this before

there's somethign that riley quinn from the trashfuture podcast keeps saying -- "if your job can be replaced by AI, it was already being done by AI". which is to say, that jobs most at risk from AI replacement are ones that were borderline automated anyway. like, i say this as someone who used to write, not for the website buzzfeed itself, but buzzfeed-adjacent Slop Content for money -- i was already just the middlewoman between the SEO optimization algorithm and the google search algorithm. those jobs vanishing primarily means that middlewoman role has been cut, computers can tell other computers to write for computers.

& similarly this is why i keep saying that, e.g. stock photographers are at risk from this, because the ideal use case for generative AI content is stuff where the actual content or quality of the image/text doesn't matter, all that matters is its presence. and yknow, living in a world where many people's livelihoods were dependent on writing and art that is fully replacable by inane computer drivel is itself indicative of something about culture under capitalism, right?

& to some degree, like i'm always saying, the immiseration of workers by advancement in technology is a universal feature of capitalism -- i recommend you read wage labour & capital to see how this phenomenon has persisted for well over a century. it's simply nothing new -- like, the stock photographers who are most at risk from this already are already employed in an industry that itself decimated in-house illustration; think about how any dime-a-dozen reomance novel you can pick up at a store nowadays has a hastily photoshopped stock photo cover when fifty years ago it would have had a bespoke cover illustration that an artist got paid for.

of course, none of that historical overview is like, comforting to people who are currently worried about their lives getting worse, and i get that -- for those people, workplace organization and industrial action is the only realistic and productive avenue to mobilize those fears. the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes produced far more material concessions on gen-AI-based immseration for workers facing precarity than any amount of furious social media ludditism has

#ask #Anonymous

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la-patrona-magdalena · 1 month ago

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Synopsis:

You always wanted your family to look at you, even just once. At least with a bit of the affection they gave to the portraits of your mother. Too bad that when they finally did, you were looking at the pages of a comic that showed the cruel future.

Inspired by the manhwa: no place for the Fake Princess

Warnings: English is not my first language, so I used a translator. Yandere content, neglect, abandonment, angst (?), allusions to death, original character (not the reader), allusions to torture. I try to keep the gender neutral,but in part there are mostly feminine pronouns. If any warnings are missing here, please let me know.

Disclaimer: This fanfic is for personal reading only. The use of this text for AI model training, data mining, commercial purposes, or any automated reproduction is strictly prohibited without the explicit consent of the author. Translation or reposting to other platforms is also strictly prohibited without the author's permission. Thank you.

You can read the fanfic in its original language (Spanish) on my AO3

prologue - Next chapter

Masterlist

Chapter one - A glimpse into the family secret

The knight of the night, the man with a thousand plans, Gotham's greatest detective, was holding his daughter, Serelith, with such tenderness and delicacy. She was crying in her arms, scared. And rightly so: Serelith had never lived through anything like this before. Her other siblings had some pity for her now, even Damian showed a hint of sympathy, probably because of the fear they all felt over what could’ve happened to her at the Joker’s hands.

Then there was the other daughter. Batman's illegitimate child, the youngest of the Waynes, no, the youngest of the Valfinsas, watching with tearful eyes from behind the bars as the family she grew up with held their blood daughter close. Leaving her alone.

The Joker just laughed, shoving the girl hard against the bars. -Hahaha! Looks like Batsy's got his favorites- he laughed louder. All the girl could do was stare through tearful eyes, praying, just once. for someone to turn around. To look at you.

-The Joker can wait. Priority is getting Serelith out of here- That’s what Dick said. The perfect big brother. Someone who, like her, had also been adopted. He handed Serelith a pill and a bottle of water. Carefully, they took Serelith away, leaving the building where the two of them had been held captive.Leaving you there. Not looking back. Not noticing you were missing.

The Joker let out a cold laugh, already getting ready to have fun with the new toy Bruce had left behind. -Don’t worry. I won’t take my eyes off you- he scoffed, looking right at you as you cried. How you wished you had gotten out of here, out of a place where no one ever looked at you.

You threw the comic across the bed, looking at it like it was the devil himself.

A few weeks ago, you'd decided to try reading comics to bond with your family. You'd once overheard Stephanie teasing Damian about reading and drawing manga, and maybe Tim might be into it too, right? After all, there are games based on comics. So, you spent your allowance on one, hoping it'd at least end with you arguing with Damian about the difference between manga and comics, or maybe Tim would recommend one based on one of his games.

You'd gone to a store after finishing your homeschooling session with Alfred, browsed a few comics, and then, suddenly, felt a strong bump against your side, right where your bag was hanging. When you looked down, you noticed three comics had fallen to the floor. You tried putting them back, but couldn’t figure out where they were supposed to go. With no other option, you looked for help from the clerk—who didn’t even bother to pay attention to you.

-Another kid trying to sneak in their hero stories? Listen, girl, you're not going to get famous just because someone randomly reads a comic drawn by a 12 years old-.

No matter how much you insisted they weren't yours, he didn't believe you. You got kicked out of the store. Great. But hey, at least you had three new comics to read for free! And not just any comics, they were about Gotham's great vigilante himself! Not exactly what you were going for, but maybe you'd get to connect with someone in your family by talking about the city's crime and its paper version.

You got back to Wayne Manor all excited, and started reading the three comics that had literally fallen from the sky.

And that's how you ended up here.

Batman: Bloodline. That was the name of the comic saga you just finished reading, the one that left a bitter taste in your mouth. At first, after reading the opening pages, you thought it was fake, a bad joke, some prankster who thought it would be hilarious to realistically draw the millionaire playboy dressed as a bat, acting as Gotham’s nocturnal hero. No wonder the shop clerk didn’t believe you. This probably wouldn’t help you get any closer to your brothers, but maybe if you showed it to Dick or Jason, they’d make fun of Bruce with you. So you kept reading.

But then all your siblings showed up, as the Robins and the Batgirls. And then you appeared. Not playing any role, not as a hero, just you. The daughter born from one of Bruce’s deepest loves, a model beautiful both inside and out, who had died just days after giving birth to you. A child who looked nothing like her mother, and even less like her father.

Everything was… eerily accurate. The mannerisms, the backstories, everyone’s personalities, they were spot on. Even the inside of the manor was a perfect match! You kept reading, uneasily, and that’s when she showed up: a girl with Bruce’s same stoic seriousness, and your mother’s same warmth. The drawing copied her features almost perfectly.

The comic was about her; Serelith. How she was found, as the original daughter. How she adapted to the family. And finally, how you and she were kidnapped by the Joker. How the family saved her. And left you behind.

You don’t want to believe it. Even if that girl crying behind the bars looked so much like you. Even if every detail lined up so perfectly. You didn’t want to believe that this family, the same one you beg and plead for even a crumb of love, forgot about you in such a horrible moment.

You hide the three comics under your pillow. You refuse to eat when Alfred calls for dinner, and you fake being asleep until the night falls.

You check the time on your phone, waiting for the right moment to come. You get up from bed and carefully make your way through the giant manor, until you’re standing in the same room where the old clock is. If it’s true, if they’re really Gotham’s vigilantes , they would notice immediately, and all of this will have been for nothing… or maybe they won’t even glance in your direction.

You didn’t see anyone for a few minutes from your hiding spot. You thought maybe they’d glanced in your direction, and were just waiting for you to leave.

Until you saw Tim, Zesti drink in hand, clear signs of sleeplessness under his eyes, dark circles, and wearing his Red Robin suit, walk up to the clock and set the time to 10:47. The same time as in the comic.

You felt your heart beating faster and faster. You wanted to cry just from seeing that time there, right in front of you. Mocking you.

You couldn’t take it anymore. You ran off, tripping over a few things along the way.

You got to your room and threw yourself into bed. You could feel the comics crinkle beneath your pillow as you laid your head down, just like your heart crumbled when you realized… that part of the comic was real. Which meant not only that you weren’t the daughter of that woman, but that all these years, and all the ones still to come, meant nothing to your family.

You feel the tears slowly forming in your eyes. You want to do something, think of a plan to avoid the day you end up in the Joker’s hands, but your mind is clouded. You try to sit up, feeling the anxiety course through your body. You need to start planning how to escape the Joker, how to live away from the Waynes. You don’t have time for whatever’s happening to you. Your trembling hand goes to search for the comics under your pillow, but it freezes when you hear someone knock on the door and then open it without waiting for an answer.

You turn to look at the entrance, finding Tim there, clearly exhausted. Your hands shift to clutch the sheets, gripping them tightly as you see Tim in his Red Robin suit standing in front of you.

Tim’s had a rough few days. He hasn’t slept well due to a case, and there’s a small crisis at Wayne Enterprises. He almost went without a shower for more than a week, he was close to breaking his own record. The lack of sleep made his instincts and everything he’s learned as a Robin falter. Even so, he insisted on going out tonight to look for clues. He got dressed and ready to leave with the others, and with a brain half-asleep, he didn’t realize something, or someone, was watching him as he was about to leave. Until he heard a noise that alerted him. By reflex, he turned to look and saw your smaller figure collide with a couch, then get up and keep running.

The sleep vanished in an instant, and on instinct, he ran after you, thinking about how he would convince you not to tell Bruce you’d seen him.

He opened the door without asking, just knocking out of courtesy, expecting to find you excited, shouting with joy at the discovery that your older brother was one of Gotham’s heroes. But instead, he saw you, breathing heavily, clutching the sheets tightly, crying.

You’ve always been sensitive, crying over the loss of your mother or because Bruce didn’t give you attention. He’d always agreed with Steph and Jason that you might be overreacting. Everyone in the family had lost someone, and it’s hard for Bruce to give more attention with so many kids and the mantle of Batman weighing on him. Even if you didn’t know the latest, you should be more patient. Besides, didn’t you have Damian keeping you company? And he was sure that at least once, you’d gone to the library with Babs…

Even though part of him thought you were exaggerating, the way you cried now, the way you trembled and avoided looking at him like he was a traitor, told him this time was different. And it made him feel something pressing inside of him.

He slowly approached the bed and sat next to you, studying you more carefully. You seemed to be on the verge of a panic attack. He tried calling your name to get your attention, but you didn’t respond.

Tim quickly thought about how to calm you down. You weren’t quite in the middle of an anxiety attack yet, so he might be able to stop it from escalating. He scanned your room, searching for something that might help him hold you steady.

…

Has your room always been this… empty? For being the daughter of a model and a millionaire, one would expect your room to be full of toys and luxuries. But it’s almost bare. There are a few things visible: misshapen cushions with exposed threads, a blanket of mismatched colors, and some decorations hanging from the shelves and walls, arranged from the ugliest to the most beautiful.

For your luck, he manages to spot a small blue plush dog on a shelf. He quickly grabs it and forces it into your smaller, more fragile hands.

– Squeeze – He orders. You obey. Your mind, at some point, kept replaying the comic's drawings, where they abandoned you, where the same person in front of you did nothing.

– Breathe with me, at least once, breathe – Tim's voice reaches your ears. By instinct, you follow, tightening the plush toy even more in your hands. The images slowly fade from your mind, what you felt could’ve been worse begins to vanish, and your tearful gaze meets a pair of blue eyes looking back at you with concern.

Tim feels a small relief inside him that you didn’t end up in a full-blown panic attack, but he's still worried about you. Why did finding out it was Red Robin cause that reaction? Why, all of a sudden, aren’t you looking at him with pleading eyes wanting attention, but instead, avoiding his gaze? The silence between you two forms slowly, becoming more noticeable, until you wipe away your tears. You summon strength to look at him and break the silence with a voice firm but trembling slightly.

–I won’t tell anyone you’re Red Robin… I promise… you can leave now – You didn’t feel like explaining to Tim that you found a comic from the future, you weren’t even sure he would believe you, or if he would listen.

He, on the other hand, was shocked. Were you kicking him out of your room? Was this your reaction to finding out he's Red Robin? Did you not care? What's wrong with you? He looked at you, still incredulous. Why were you acting like this all of a sudden? Or had you always been, and I just hadn’t paid enough attention to you? He replayed the events of the week in his mind, remembering that you once talked about going to buy comics, maybe like you tried to talk at dinner… dinner from… how long ago was that? He kept going over what he remembered, what could’ve triggered your near panic attack? Why weren’t you looking at him like before? And why, now that you did, was it with coldness and pain? Then it clicked. Maybe you heard his recent conversation with Jason? Both had mentioned what he talked about with Steph, how sometimes you cried too much and seemed exaggerated. Was that it? That was probably it, right? Maybe not the reason for your near anxiety crisis, but it was definitely why you wanted him out of your room. You didn’t want him to keep seeing you like this, did you? Well, he wasn’t the best at handling emotions, that was more Dick’s thing, but still, he couldn’t leave you emotionally constipated. They already had enough of that from Bruce, Jason, and Damian. So, he left your room, informed Bruce that he wouldn’t go out with them tonight, changed out of his suit into pajamas, and came back to your room. You looked at him confused. He didn’t blame you, he had never been close to you like this before, but now, he wanted to be. He wanted you to stop looking at him like that.

Thank God you took the opportunity when Tim left to move the comics. You couldn’t do much, just toss them under your bed. You were hoping he wouldn’t look there now that it seemed he wanted to sleep in your room. He lay next to you, and you gave him his space. You both stared at each other in silence for a few seconds, until he finally decided to break it.

–Are you okay?–

It was a simple question, short and direct, yet you just stared at the ceiling. Thinking about his question and everything else.

Some comics, from who knows where, revealed to you that this isn’t your biological family, that they’re also Gotham’s vigilantes, and that for a girl they’d known for only a few months, they abandoned you; To the daughter who, even if not by blood, had been part of the family all its life

Should you have seen it coming? Yes. Ever since you can remember, no one in this family has really worried about you, paid attention to you, or even looked at you. No parent events, no movie nights, nothing. You don’t have memories of anyone except Alfred giving you ice cream for every good grade on your tests.

Why were they different with you? More than half of the family doesn’t share blood, yet they still love and care for each other. Couldn’t you get just a little bit of that affection? What was different?

Was it because you took the place of your mother’s true daughter? Maybe they always felt like you didn’t belong, like you weren’t what they expected.

Serelith was the original, the real one. That’s why she earned their affection. That’s why everyone else cares about her. Not even your brothers… No, not even Bruce’s adopted sons or his two biological children lied. Only you. You were the only one who entered the family through a lie you never even told.

They’re detectives. Even if they don’t say anything or investigate, their instincts probably tell them you’re not who you’re supposed to be…

And now that you’ve confirmed the comics are real, it means you’re destined to suffer at the hands of the Joker.

In the comics, he finds out about Bruce’s “beloved” daughters, the only ones in the family who aren’t vigilantes, and kidnaps both of you. The family quickly comes up with a plan to search for you… to search for her. Bruce and the others completely forget you exist, leaving you at the mercy of one of Gotham’s worst criminals.

Were you okay? …No, you weren’t. Not while you remained in this family that doesn’t really feel like yours. What you want most now is to get out of here, for the Joker to never see you as Batman’s daughter, for no one to see you at all, until you’re far from where you never belonged. Only then would you be okay. But for now…

– Yeah, I’m fine – you answered, sounding a little too calm for Tim’s liking. He just sighed beside you and turned to face the other way. He couldn’t bear to look at you. Tomorrow, he’d make sure to finish the case and the situation at Wayne Enterprises as fast as possible, so he could focus entirely on figuring out what was going on with you. – Good night – Tim said as he tried to fall asleep. – Good night – you answered, turning your back to him as well, already thinking about how you’d make a plan tomorrow to leave this place as soon as possible.

This was supposed to be posted yesterday, but I had trouble concentrating and translating it into English. I’ll try to update this fic every Friday, or at least every two weeks if time allows. If for some reason I can’t stick to the two-week schedule (which probably means I have writer’s block and won’t be writing for a while), I’ll let you know. I’ll probably update on Ao3 first because the fanfic was originally written in my native language, and I’m posting everything there in its original form, in case anyone wants to check it out. On another note, I wonder if anyone will notice that the section dividers are different, one has Batfam and Philomel images in the background, and the other is empty…

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