A column written by a man, pen on paper

The Column: 02.10.23

There are new improved robotic programs available that can respond to a request (“Need a job application. 500 words, it says. Okay? The job is Vice President for Impact. Whatever.”) and the bot will create text with a dull mechanical style, a useful tool for the many young people graduating from high school with third-grade writing skills. The problem comes when you’re hired for the $100,000/year V.P.I. job to manage impact and equity access at the Associated Federation of Organizations and the bot is cranking out memos about the pipeline issues of educative assessment and initiatives access and prioritizing social learning to normalize and de-gender programming, and suddenly you need to chair meetings of the impact task force and explain things that you do not yourself understand.

You are now in a thick and tasteless soup. The pay is good but you’re a fish gasping for breath. There are ten thousand vice presidents for impact and the impact they make is that of a soft sponge dropped on a hard floor. It’s all jargon, words that serve only to fill space.

You’d be better off going over to Joe’s Garage and getting a job starting cars this cold February.

Starting a frozen car is an act of mercy and it’s well within your skill set. You don’t need a robot. You can afford to be cheerful, ask people how their day is going — it’s going better now that you’re there. Many of your clients will be drivers who’re not clear on how to attach jumper cables to batteries ­­— is it positive to positive or positive to negative? And they read somewhere online that if you get it wrong, sparks will fly and you’ll need to wear diapers for the rest of your life.

But here you are in your white overalls that say “competence” and you pull up nose to nose with the client’s car and she gets out. “Having trouble?” you say. “I don’t know what happened, it started yesterday,” she says. “And now I’m half an hour late for work.”

What happened is that the temperature dropped forty degrees. “Don’t worry, everybody’s running late today,” you say. You open the hood of her car and attach the cables, positive to positive, negative to neutral ground, such as the hood. You wave at her to turn the key and start it and of course she pumps the gas and floods the engine.

“Just hold the pedal to the floor.” She can’t hear you; her window is frozen. And she is weeping. You open her door and motion for her to get out. She is weeping for fear her husband will come out and yell at her. You pat her shoulder. You take her place and hold the pedal down, The car starts. You remove your jumper cables and she holds out a credit card and on impulse you wave it away. “Don’t worry about it, have a nice day,” you say.

You have now done a plain good deed for another human being in trouble. Her life was in disarray and you got her back on track. She will go to her job as Executive Director for Inclusive Pedagogy at a nearby college and spend the day harassing the faculty with warnings about respecting students’ cultural subsets, but you have had a genuine interaction and made an impact: you started a car. She thinks about this all day as she talks inclusivity jargon and she decides to go back to teaching first grade. It pays a fraction of what E.D. of B.S. pays but you get to do real work that changes children’s lives for the better.

Better and better bots will be developed, millions of texts will be analyzed by mega-computers, you’ll be able to choose prose styles from Jane Austen, George Bush, Coleridge, Joan Didion, Emerson, Francine Prose, Al Gore, Hemingway, St. Ignatius, and some of it’ll almost sound right, meanwhile you’ll go on texting your friends (“Wassup?”) and then one day the Chinese will run a joke into the system — two penguins on an ice floe, one says, “You look like you’re wearing a tuxedo” and the other says, “What makes you think I’m not?” — and this nonsense will bring down the whole grid, Wi-Fi gone, stoplights out, no Google, no TikTok, and all the folks in the Impact Department will need to find other jobs, such as unclogging toilets. Somebody has to do it and they have the necessary experience, having done more clogging than anyone else.

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