Al not Ai

 The mission, should I choose to accept it, was to find out where The Boss purchased the expensive tool - now a heap of junk sitting unceremoniously on top of my desk –  and return it.

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Preferably for a full refund. Or an exchange for a factory-tested working model. Basically, your holy grail of customer service … followed all the way back to the manufacturer. Maybe there’s hope.

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The additional pieces of information that he didn’t know included when he bought the item and whether he had ever filled out the small card that validated the so-called warranty.

I know I didn’t.

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So, in effect, the task ahead of me was looking for a minor miracle.

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Which, after a few minutes of scrounging around through credit card statements and the drawer where our library of operating manuals is filed in no apparent order, I am on the verge of giving up.

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Another expensive piece of equipment bites the dust.

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I understand this mission, which I’ve embarked on so many times before, is a performative circling of the wagons in hopes of finding that the answer is as easy as finding a pocket of the known universe where costs aren’t relative and durable goods are still durable. A pocket time hasn’t changed.

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I was ruminating on these intrusive thoughts as I began to search the interwebs for a reasonable replacement.

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Surprisingly, I couldn’t find one.

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Typing in the trademarked name didn’t help. All the hits looked similar, but, upon closer inspection, it was clear the options were only look-alikes with rhyming names, devoid of important letters.

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And under other circumstances, I may not have noticed the switcheroo..

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Honestly, my fingers drummed away on the keyboard, and I found myself in a vaguely familiar place, looking incredulously at an item description that was almost exactly what I needed.

If not a little confusing.

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The company would exchange my defective item with a factory-authorized refurbished tool for only a small fee and the cost of shipping. All I had to do was submit an inquiry form, complete with the number of tools I would be sending them and a return address.

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Another human (and I wouldn’t blame them) would see this as just another chapter in the book of Too Good To Be True. Best just to skip it.

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The more I searched for the normal solution, the more I realized that the trophy I sought might have been discontinued. I was embarking on a journey to find a holy grail.

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Since I couldn’t find the interactive form the website alluded to, I called the phone number at the bottom of the page and waited for someone to answer as the cinematic scope of this idea filled my head.

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“Hold on … you need to talk with Al.”

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And after a few missed connections from hold (thanks to a new phone system), Al called back.

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And, to my complete amazement, Al was a real person, with one small part of his job being the repair and replacement of a particular make of tool. It was also his job to make the company website function efficiently, which he was dismayed to find it wasn’t smooth enough for a rube like me. (He plans on rectifying that, too.)

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Honestly, it was a breath of fresh air to talk to a real person who had an easy answer to my problem that still felt so old-world impossible.

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I mailed the package that day, and two business days later, he mailed it back.

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All fixed. With a little sack of hard candy and a note thanking me for my business.

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Who needs AI … When there’s AL.

Freedumb rings

 I felt unsettled as I opened “the paper” and saw the expressionless face of a young girl standing behind a tall man reaching into what I presumed was her backpack.

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The photo illustrated a news item that heralded a new security system and accompanying procedures at Cohoes High School.

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Metal detectors and bag searches are now a hand-in-glove partner with education. In 2022, the most recent year data was published by the National Center for Educational Statistics, only about two percent of schools employed daily use of metal detectors.

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This was merely a photo op documenting the depressing reality of our circumstances: Danger lurks where we least expect it, so we need to prepare ourselves for the intrusion of inspection. All shoes are off. And no matter how sweet and diminutive that child looks, we have accepted that they could be one failing grade and one firing pin away from causing mayhem.

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All the people interviewed for the story seemed resigned, if not happy, about the development. The expense, in the fifties of thousands, is to be written off as the price of our “better-safe-than-sorry,” insistence.

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I understand that doing “something” feels important. And I understand that the “somethings” we can do are not failsafe. They are plastic bandages, and humps of cement, and fortifications. They are all our fears re-packaged as limited protections.

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We all kind of know the limitations: The screenings create a bottleneck at school entrances, which often results in significant delay; the machines also have a high rate of detecting things that are not harmful, such as binder rings and calculators. And all of this aids in the creation of a prison-like atmosphere, where students bear the brunt of scrutiny and suspicion.

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And perhaps worst of all, according to numerous reports, as well as an inflated sense of peril, the reliance on such technology in schools leads to a false sense of security. It provides a quick fix to a problem that needs something more comprehensive than mere mortals like us can comprehend.

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This will become painfully clear the moment a newspaper like this one finds itself reporting the aftermath of a school shooting where the suspect printed a series of 3-D gun parts inside of shop class and assembled the weapon at study hall. Allegedly.

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We have accepted that life in America is dangerous. Yet we are never going to give up guns. We are never going back to a time when fear isn’t foisted upon us. We are going to grin and bear it.

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We can get used to weapons of war, militarized police, and a president who blurts out descriptions of war crimes that he emboldens our country’s leaders to commit. And we are willing to give up our privacy and the presumption of innocence if it might mean one fewer crime is committed.

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When I say this is not the right move, I’ll hear vehement disagreement coming from inside my own house. I have raised people who trust the technology, even as it requires them to take off their shoes, throw out their filled water bottles, and jettison the 6-ounce tube of toothpaste some scanner detected as contraband at the airport.

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“This is how it works now,” they will tell me. The old woman tilting at windmills. “Hope for the best and plan for the worst. We can buy another tube of toothpaste at a drugstore.”

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“We should be planning for better and expecting the best.”

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Don’t our children deserve that effort?

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“Sure. That’s why you’ll be buying fat, felt-tipped markers and posterboards when we get there.”

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We grow up, but we don't stop learning

 The headline grabbed my attention: How do you teach kids to be responsible?​

Oh, here we go.

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My hackles raised as I read through the vertical text from the anonymous writer who was complaining about their adolescent son’s repetitive forgetfulness in packing necessary sports equipment ahead of time, requiring (at least in the teen’s estimation) an abrupt delivery of gear as an emergency. With each unexpected delivery, however, it seemed apparent that the pair’s tolerance of each other’s patience grew increasingly tense.

Naturally, the advisor assumed the parent was the mother and that the teen was a boy-child, and as such spent some dozen or so words explaining how it would not be fair to the teen’s future wife if he expected her to be his sherpa.

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The writer then spent a few hundred more words describing all the snarky ways a response would teach the kid a lesson, such as charging a fee for the delivery that would be refunded if the kid could figure out a solution that didn’t require parental involvement.

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The writer also helpfully imagined the person’s selfish child yelling, crying, and screaming over the phone and hanging up.

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I don’t know why I tend to bristle at such advice.

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I recall, at the dawn of the cell phone age, before I became a parent, I passed a similar judgment. I was shopping in a department store when the purse of a woman across the rack from me started ringing. There was a momentary silence after she picked up the phone until she blurted out a complete story of parenthood immemorial in one simple question: “How am I supposed to know where your soccer cleats are in that mess you call a room?”

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Back then, I wasn’t judging her or her parenting.

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I wasn’t judging the kid, whose voice I hadn’t heard and whose gender I did not guess.

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I just wondered: “For this, we need to be reachable at all times? This is progress?”

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Today, my phone rang.

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It was a child who hadn’t “needed me” to do, or bring, or help with anything in a long time.

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This child just wanted to say hello. Hear my voice. Check in.

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I should say this is an adult. … Because this adult was once a child who forgot things. This was a child who requested last-minute interventions that I was sure would continue needing my attention forever, and the forgetfulness would persist despite my stern face and evident displeasure as I dutifully delivered whenever humanly possible.

The calls stopped coming.

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It didn’t happen overnight, but it certainly seems like it now.

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How fast time flies may be a cliché, but it is also an incontrovertible truth.

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A part of me thinks my “teachings” were my kids simply figuring out how to deal with their parents, or their friends, or all the other people and things in their lives they couldn’t entirely control.

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We tilt at windmills, and cell phones, and adolescent brains. and our mid-life malaise. It doesn’t always work out the way we hoped, but it happens.

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Our children grow up.

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Time keeps changing us, too.

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Experience is the actual teacher. And we are never too old to learn.

The stories of our demise are greatly dimished

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“I could have lived forever …”  my mother used to say. It would be her standard response whenever I had divulged some morsel of information that, to her, seemed over the top: Something excessive, extravagant, outside of norms … or something entirely too personal.

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Not that she was squeamish. She was keen to see all skinned knees, infected cuts, or random swelling that seemed to come out of nowhere.

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But gossip, or taking some unnecessary risk, as she thought of it – especially if it was delivered in the form of news and information – she felt better off just not knowing.

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I knew her better, though.

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Her mind thirsted for information she could parse.

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Her mind could sift truth from fiction as efficiently as she could discern her daughter’s true intentions from her insistence I had none.

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I think of the sparkle in her eye and her mischievous half-grin whenever I open my computer to the news of the day.

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My inbox is filled with stories about health and wellness; each one extolling the virtues of what I try to assume, when forwarded by friends and loved ones, these are well-meant suggestions sealed with love and, often, care-animated emojis.

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Sometimes they include links to lengthy articles written in a scholarly style that purport some recent finding extrapolated from science and translated into easily digestible prose.  

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Often their messages conflict.

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Why, just this week, I gleaned through missives that trumpeted THE key to longevity as not only being busy and feeling useful as we age, but also remaining optimistic, or more pointedly, resilient.

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Of course, it sounds good. It sounds like something we should know intuitively. Like common sense, or the proverbial sense God gave goats, but just a few clicks away into the archives of “like-minded articles,” I am confronted with the polar opposite.

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Here are the stories that warn against my desire to drink coffee, or confirm my bias against red wine. Here are the stories that make the case for doing nothing at all. Here are the choice parts of studies that tell not to do what today’s studies are tentatively debunking … in mice.

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My mother always hated these stories the most.

In her mind, these harmless little stories that asked a centenarian to provide the key to their longevity and hearing that it was knocking back a whiskey once a day, or never going to bed angry, or exercising obsessively, or not at all … after all how many studies show how many people visit emergency rooms each year as a result of an accident when they were exercising?!!

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The only thing we know for sure is that we humans don’t live forever. We can do all the right things, and we still might not get to live long enough.

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I knew she was right … but I also knew that keeping busy helped settle anxieties. The occasional glass of wine gave her pleasure, of course, but not nearly as much pleasure as she gleaned from debunking the myths “experts” kept trying to pass off as incontrovertible truth.

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I half-smile as I close the newspaper story, knowing I will not live forever, but I will probably live to see today’s revelations debunked.

Found, in translation

 I slipped the keycard into a pocket and left the hotel just after sunrise. I was groggy, having slept fitfully. I was intent on clocking an easy run through a narrow park we’d strolled past the night before, and I’d spent the majority of the evening retracing the steps we had taken back from dinner.

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Amsterdam is a beautiful city with its tall, narrow buildings, some of them leaning gently over boat-lined canals.

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It looked different in the morning. Red lights surprised me. And I hadn’t noticed the confetti of cigarette ends, until I witnessed shopkeepers sweeping them into grates and the end of the sidewalks.

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The plantings looked a little wild and untended but also fierce and fine.

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Perfectly matching the blur of this morning commute. A young woman with a messy bun and a tailored coat sits tall on her bike as she glides quickly through an intersection and joins the flow of traffic. She is followed by a boy, then a girl; a mother with a child in cargo; a man with a briefcase; an older woman with flowers; two friends holding hands.

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It was mostly quiet except for the occasional ting-ting of a bell.

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The sun was intent on cracking into my skull as I made my way to Vondelpark, a 47 hectare- (about 116 acres) urban oasis with nearly three-miles of soft and hard track meaning through lush scenery.

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The crocuses and daffodils had already made their debut. The early blossoms seemed like a gift to us, having practically shoveled our way out of the driveway a fortnight ago just to get to the airport.

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Honestly, I was surprised but delighted to see the gate at only the five-minute mark on my journey. Perhaps all roads heading west would have led me there eventually.

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I needn’t have worried myself awake, imagining myself a sprung spring in the Amsterdam clockwork … irritating the local folks just trying to get in their workouts, or taking in the fresh air of the new season as they make their way to school and work. And me - the stranger - destined to get in the way.

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Because the flow of the city was apparent from just watching it move around me. I couldn’t even miss the gaps where I should aim to fit into its current.

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On the street, the bikes rode on smooth, red lanes while pedestrians ambled down textured pavers. Where crossings happened, the peddlers slowed and the amblers sped up to accommodate each other. At intersections, each pack waited patiently for their symbols to turn green.

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Bikes crossed where there were arrows painted on the asphalt and walkers crossed where there were parallel stripes.

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In the park, the rules seemed to widen. Runners and bikers shared the main road; bikers stayed centered, navigating smoothly around runners who clung to the edges. Walkers, some with dogs on leashes, and one with a cat, kept to the pebbled pathways and grassy fields.

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Together, we moved clockwise and counterclockwise around the park. The birds singing, bells chiming, the scent of blossoms in the air.

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Before I knew it, and without ever stopping to take a single picture, I had connected my loop. I briefly considered making another circle before admitting there wouldn’t be time. I would still need to fit in a shower and breakfast before trekking out to the museum queue for our advance-ticketed time slot.

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I still have miles to go before I sleep.

The Art of Confusion

 The captain’s soothing voice came over the public address system. He’d already broken through the calming lull of the free entertainment portion of our travels — which, for me, meant a newly released movie in which I’d been delightedly engrossed — several times to apologize for the minor turbulence the cabin had been experiencing.

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I’d expected another update on the gentle bumps he charmingly begged for our pardon. …

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“Chicken dentist …. “

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I accepted the strange announcement with barely a blink. Must have heard it wrong.

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This trip had already gotten off to a weird start when two burly men showed up at the airport restaurant we’d chosen to wait out our early arrival, looked at my husband, and said my name.

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“Not to worry, ma’am, we need to sort out some things back at security, it seems there’s been a bit of a switcheroo. You’ll come right back.”

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Turns out my husband had handed me the wrong laptop as we collected the things arriving in bins fresh from the X-ray machine after we’d cleared security.

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I followed them back to the “scene of the crime,” my husband would later joke, to collect the correct computer and extend my sincerest apologies to the rightful owner of the one in my possession.

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And as promised, I returned in short order to my “short order” that carried a very long price tag.

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Not that I would complain … at least not with the panache nor effrontery of the former great, David Brooks.

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But I digress.

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I find the minor headaches and hardships of travel to be the things I come to love most, no matter how much I angst ahead of time about their probabilities.

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Eventually, we would buy the wrong train ticket and have to pay a fine, suffering more from the stern admonition for not having checked the itinerary more thoroughly than from the extra charge tacked on.

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We would ask for something potentially obscene because we had learned absolutely nothing from our efforts with the train billets kiosks that we could apply to translation apps, besides the silly notion that “it would be different this time.”

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Of course, one of us — not saying who — would forget where he’d hidden his passport just as we reached a surprise border checkpoint midway through a tram ride.

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And another of us would pack her bags like she packs a dishwasher: half as many tops and twice as many bottoms. Nothing matches or even makes sense.

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Neither of us would be able to find our way back to the hotel on the first try.

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My husband, poor guy, isn’t used to feeling turned around. He seemed to suffer a disorienting amount of navigational error made under the apparent duress of being jet-laggy in an unfamiliar place.

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For once, I wasn’t worried. As he glared at his map, I took in the sight of people all around us, settling into the river’s terraced edge. As the sun lowered, they toasted each other and the end of another workday with cans of ale they retrieved from their convenience-store bags.  

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I convinced him to have a grocery-shopped picnic by the water.

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There would be time enough to find our hotel. We might even find the secrets of happiness as we nosh on soft cheese and take sips of hard cider. I hope it has something to do with Chicken Dentists.

International incidents

I woke up as if by premonition.

Four A.M.

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The room was dark and soundless except for the steady blinking clockface of an unset video player and the buzz-saw of my husband’s snoring.

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Because I was awake, I checked my phone for changes since the last time I let myself distractedly doom scroll …  sometime before turning in for the night and actually falling asleep. Of course, there was news and emails I could ignore, but there was also a text message from my daughter who was traveling for spring break.

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At first, I was a little nervous. Not about the hour (she was in a different time zone, afterall) but about the volume. Although I hadn’t read any of them yet, there seemed to be too many words to be a “happy” communique.

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But I took a breath and began digesting, immediately understanding from the first sentence that she was miserable, and enjoying it.

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As I continued thumbing through the missive, she ranted in glorious detail about the hardships of traveling – the confusion of not being able to find your hotel lobby because it looks like a fancy cafe; or missing one train, and then another, and finding out you’ve gotten on the wrong one anyway. She tucks expletives between every third word describing how she had gone from a flawless experience during her arrival to a disaster spiral upon departure.

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“Ok, perfect. Great. Wonderful! Like ha-ha, everyone else here knows what they are doing. But the terminal is not the terminal, and the stop is not the stop. There are no train numbers, and nothing makes sense to me. … and a lady with a fancy scarf is asking me why I’m looking at the app instead of the board … which doesn’t look like a board at all. So now I am forced to hate EVERYONE because it appears I might have to live here now.”

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Three dots appear before there is more:

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She recounts that she and her traveling companion woke up later than they had planned to and missed breakfast. Then, the first tourist destination they arrived at was unexpectedly closed. They selected a familiar coffee chain to get a quick infusion of caffeine, but forgot to place the order “To Go.”

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So they sat at a table with glassware and tried to “cannonball” iced teas.

They stopped in shops and bought presents. She includes photos of a set of pottery bowls she’s bringing back.

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I can picture her flailing her arms and spinning on her heel once or twice as she exhales her tension in the torrent of contrary words. She is having a blast.

I am smiling in the dark and wondering if I should nudge my husband to share his morsel of news from abroad.

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Instead, I press her last word bubble until the phone lets me respond with a “Ha ha” emoji.

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Her immediate response makes me laugh harder: “What the heck!? Why aren’t you in bed?”

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“Motherly instinct, perhaps: I had to make sure you were having a blast and not causing an international incident. I can go back to sleep now.”