Man creates chatbot to handle “Happy New Year!” conversations with colleagues

"It wasn’t hard to build," Moreau shrugged. "People ask the same things every year, and nobody listens to your answers anyway. They’re just waiting for their turn to talk about themselves."

In a bold move to preserve his sanity, financial director Alexandre Moreau has developed a chatbot specifically designed to handle the relentless onslaught of "Happy New Year!" greetings and banal small talk that flood the workplace in January.

The idea struck Moreau during the first week of 2024 when, as he put it, "Every five minutes some over-rested, over-chatty colleague would burst in like a human fire alarm."

"They’d start with ‘Happy New Year!’ like it was a groundbreaking announcement, then regale me with tales of their tedious holidays before whining about how hard it was to be back at work. Hard? I worked through Christmas! I swear, the next person who said it was getting drop-kicked into HR."

Aware that workplace violence wasn't an option (his anger management stint for throwing a printer out the window in 2022 had taught him that) Moreau spent 2024 crafting a different solution.

Using his Christmas holiday (a “holiday” spent dodging family Zoom calls), Moreau developed a chatbot powered by a large language model (LLM). The bot was programmed to parrot generic pleasantries and recycle holiday anecdotes to keep conversation minimal.

"It wasn’t hard to build," Moreau shrugged. "People ask the same things every year, and nobody listens to your answers anyway. They’re just waiting for their turn to talk about themselves."

For added realism, Moreau assembled a decoy stand-in: a watermelon on a bucket, draped with a macramé pot holder his niece made him for Christmas. This "Alexandre 2.0" was placed behind a computer monitor where the chatbot handled interactions.

To Moreau's amazement, and mild offence, the setup worked. Colleagues barely noticed the swap."I watched from the quiet room," Moreau said, “and it was like a low-budget nature documentary. Karen came in, yapped about her skiing trip, and didn’t realise she’d already told me, well, the bot, the same story earlier.”

However, the bot eventually buckled under the strain of repetitive conversations. After Karen's third visit, the chatbot snapped.

"It wished her a happy new year filled with many more ski trips in which she broke all the bones in her body and bit out her tongue!" Moreau recalled. "I was both horrified and a little proud."

While the chatbot experiment ended with a formal warning from IT and an awkward team meeting about “office harmony,” Moreau says he has no regrets.

"Honestly, it just confirmed what I suspected: most conversations at work are a colossal waste of time. If I’ve inspired one thing, it’s this: next year, maybe we’ll all just send a group email and leave it at that."

Moreau paused. "Or, I dunno, maybe I’ll invent a robot to punch people in the private parts. Just kidding. Probably."