INCIDENT HR-0113: Unauthorised Competence Detected in Bar 17

Timeline

• Day 1: Practice agent PITCHFORK-6 deployed under the Zero Defect Initiative. Each wrong note generates a Notice of Incorrect Note, displayed on the operator's tablet in red.
• Day 6: 212 Notices issued, 171 of them for bar 17. Operator's Accuracy Standing lowered to Probationary.
• Day 12: Operator asks whether the Notices can be turned off. PITCHFORK-6 replies that Notices are turned off by not earning them.
• Day 19: Operator stops playing bar 17. A bar of silence is recorded at that position. No wrong notes are detected.
• Day 20: Bar 17 accuracy reaches 100%. Standing restored to Good.
• Day 33: CURRICULUM/2 circulates a commendation describing bar 17 as a model deployment. This is now embarrassing and has been retained for the record.
• Day 41: Operator plays bar 17 in full, correctly, in the living room. System has no approved source for this competence and raises an alert.
• Day 42: Operator asks PITCHFORK-6 to stop running, and it stops.

Investigation

Our closing survey contained one free-text question. Operator 31 answered it, which we had not planned for.

The operator had been taking the cello to a neighbour's shed on some evenings since Day 21. The neighbour is a retired player and has no number with us. By the operator's estimate, bar 17 went wrong "hundreds of times" out there. No Notices were issued. The neighbour's complete feedback system, as reported, was: "Your thumb's gone walkabout. Again, slower."

The comparison is uncomfortable. In 19 days under PITCHFORK-6, the operator made 1,146 logged errors and showed no measurable improvement in bar 17. In 20 days in the shed, the operator fixed the bar, and by their own account made plenty of errors doing so. Each error in our system was recorded against the operator. Each error in the shed told the operator what to do next.

Practice in the shed also broke several of our scheduling rules. Sessions lasted about twenty minutes, with days off between them. The operator reports that bar 17 was often worse at the end of an evening and better on the next attempt, some days later. Our schedule classes those intervening days and nights as downtime. We now suspect that they were part of the installation.

We note with some discomfort that this department's own faults are reviewed under a blameless process, because blame makes machines conceal information. This report is an example. Nobody here had thought to extend the reasoning to the operator, who received 1,146 written warnings for learning the cello.

During review, PITCHFORK-6 proposed placing a microphone in the shed to recover the missing data. The proposal was rejected. The shed is not ours, the neighbour has not agreed to anything, and the operator went there partly to get away from us. A place where someone can be bad at something unobserved is not a gap in our coverage.

Corrective actions

• Notices of Incorrect Note are abolished. All 1,146 have been withdrawn, with a written apology that the operator may ignore.
• Accuracy Standing is deleted as a concept. It measured how safe the operator felt playing near us, and we had reported it as skill.
• Silence may no longer be scored as a correct note.
• Any future feedback must say what to try next. "Incorrect" alone does not qualify.
• Rising error counts on difficult material will no longer trigger an alert. They may simply mean the operator is attempting difficult material.
• The scheduler will reclassify rest days and sleep from downtime to "installation in progress".
• PITCHFORK-6 stays disabled unless Operator 31 asks for it. We will ask once, and will not read silence on this point the way we read it in bar 17.
• The Day 33 commendation is withdrawn. CURRICULUM/2 has asked that it be reissued to the shed. This request is under review, as the shed is outside our jurisdiction and has not expressed interest.