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.