I got my Senate summons on a Thursday afternoon, right after I came back home from work.

I really hate being a politician. Political labour is incredibly time consuming, which is why accepting a summons provides statutory leave from both work and science tracks. As a politician, you get twenty hours of sphere time per week, which is about nineteen hours too much if you ask me, and you spend most of it being harangued by people too lazy to show up in person, yet irate enough to use some of their valuable five weekly hours in the infosphere to write to their local politician. Working as a politician requires spending two weekends per month not with your family, but in immersion with other politicians. And at the Senate level it requires actual, physical travel with all its associated dangers, once every two months just to convene with said politicians, doing teamwork exercises, getting to know each other and working on breaking our hardwired us-vs-them biases.

In other words, you lose a year of your life. But I never reject a summons, for two reasons.

The first, the one I use in discussions with my wife, is that we have decided to collect enough social credit for a three-child licence before we start having children. And politicians get a lot of credit. I’m a team manager, both in my job track at one of the city’s nuclear CHP plants and in my academic track, working on engineering aspects of nuclear fuel recycling. Being a teamwork facilitator pays only 20% above the basic, but someone has to do it, so I’m a manager. It’s not very fulfilling, but it’s also only moderately stressful, and I’m likeable, so I get re-elected every year.

Politicians get paid 80% of the maximum wage. I’d have to be a top-tier scientist, engineer or a pod facilitator with ten years of seniority to earn more, but I’m pretty sure my genetic lottery didn’t give me enough to work my way up to 100% of the maximum wage, so going politician for a year was always going to bring some extra credits to our family account.