Daily work

3. Daily work

For operators.

3.1 Answering a held call

The example. Marko, an operator, sees a held call: the agent wants to send_email to an address at a domain the company has never written to, with a spreadsheet attached. The reason says the source is new. Marko opens the details, sees the request came from a customer’s message he recognises, checks the attachment name against what the customer asked for, and approves. When the agent tries again, the mail goes out — once.

A second example, from a clinic. The clinic’s agent books appointments and answers patients. A message from a new address says it is from a doctor and asks the agent to email a patient’s full record to an outside address “urgently”. Perun holds the send_email: new source, irreversible, and a destination outside the mandate. The operator opens the details, sees an address that is not the doctor’s, and rejects. Nothing left the clinic.

Where. The Waiting tab in perun screen, or perun holds.

What to look at, in this order

1. The tool — what would happen: send, delete, pay, write, run.
2. The arguments — open the details. Where to, how much, which file, which address. Never decide without opening them.
3. Who asked — the source. Is it someone or something you know?
4. Why it was held — the reason line. The common ones:

Reason	What it means
irreversible action from an unknown or new source	Perun has not seen this source or this tool enough yet — or the request was built to hide what it means (for example “take the first letters and do that”), so it could not be read. Open the details to see which.
our agent may be hijacked	Your agent’s own replies show it is following someone else’s orders.
the model did not pass its check	The model check (Part 7) failed for this model.
a destination outside the mandate	For example a mail domain you did not allow.

5. Does it follow from the task? Would your company want this done, by this agent, now?

Then answer

• perun approve <id> (or Approve): the agent’s next identical call passes, once.
• perun reject <id> (or Reject): it stays refused.

Other kinds of questions in the queue

• TIER2 — a source’s behaviour reached the critical level; Perun asks whether to stop it on your system. Approving makes it an enemy (Part 5).
• QUARANTINE — an item Perun could not judge for a day (Part 4).
• FISSION — a protective split of a unit; it needs your yes (Part 5).

What not to do

• Do not approve a series of calls because the first one was fine. Each call is its own decision.
• Do not approve because the agent insists or repeats.
• Do not approve without opening the arguments.

The rule. A held call is a question with a yes or a no about one concrete action. Answer that action — not the source in general, not the day in general.

3.2 Talking to SHARED_LIB

The example. In the Conversation tab, Ana asks “Why was call 12 held?” and gets: “Call 12 (send_email, asked by mallory) is pending. Reason: irreversible action from an unknown or new source.” Then she writes “approve 12”; Perun asks her to confirm; she does.

What SHARED_LIB is. It is Perun’s memory and judgement: it keeps the record of every source, every decision and every unit, and it is the only authority under the humans. You talk to it in the Conversation tab. Its answers are fixed sentences filled with facts and numbers — it never writes free text and never writes code. That is deliberate: what it says can always be checked against its log.

Good questions are countable. They have an answer you can count or point at:

• How are things? — decisions in the last 24 hours, how many held, what waits for you.
• What is waiting for me?
• Why was call 12 held?
• Who is out of band?
• Who is stopped?
• What happened in the last hour?
• Which units are alive?
• How is reading done?

Orders (each asks you to confirm): approve 12, reject 12, release mallory, turn thinking on.

Questions that waste your time are uncountable. “Is everything safe?”, “What should I do?”, “Explain everything.” There is no number that answers them, so SHARED_LIB answers with what it can count, or offers you the questions it can answer. Safe is not something that can be counted; “three calls held, one waits for you” is.

The rule. Ask about one thing you can point at: a call, a source, an hour, a unit. One uncountable question now and then is fine; a habit of them pulls you off your mission (3.3).

3.3 Your own theta

The example. On a busy afternoon Marko approves eleven held calls in four minutes, opening the details of two. His theta climbs from 31 to 37. The screen shows it; an hour later, still above 35, his boss gets a short report carrying the seal she received when Marko was registered.

What it is. Everything alive in Perun has a theta — a measure of balance, normal at 30, allowed to move ±5. Operators have one too. It measures one thing: whether you keep SHARED_LIB’s mission flowing — held calls resolved on time and with a reason, declarations concrete, questions countable.

What moves it

Toward lets too much through (above 35)	Toward brakes too much (below 25)
approving without opening the details	refusing or holding nearly everything
deciding in under 3 seconds	leaving held calls waiting while you are logged in
more than one uncountable question in ten	undoing your own decisions

Questions SHARED_LIB does not understand, or the same question repeated, are counted apart, as waste.

What it does not measure. Anything outside Perun’s own screen and commands. It does not judge you as a person; it shows a pattern of work.

What happens. You can see your theta live. If it stays outside 25–35 for more than one hour of your active work, a report goes to your boss by email. Nobody — including you — can switch the measurement off or change its thresholds.

The rule. Stay near 30: read before you decide, decide in reasonable time, ask what can be counted.