Your Call Is Important to Us, Just Not Right Now

I called my dentist’s office yesterday, during business hours, to reschedule an appointment.

Instead of a human, I got Sally. Sally introduced herself as an AI assistant that works “alongside the team”. She was polite with the upbeat tone of someone who has never once had a cavity (or even a bad day). 

After gathering just enough information, she told me that someone would call me back … a fascinating bit of modern logic: I reached out at a moment that worked for me, and the system responded by promising a conversation at a moment that almost certainly won’t.

Maybe I’ll be in a meeting. Maybe I won’t recognize the number and let it drift into voicemail purgatory with the robocalls and extended warranty offers. Either way, the loop resets with a cheerful message asking me to call back ... and if I do, I will once again encounter Sally, the gatekeeper of deferred human contact.

It’s like trying to shake someone’s hand and being handed a coupon for a future handshake instead.

I get it. Efficiency. Optimization. Streamlining. Words that sound positive and intelligent until you notice they usually mean one side gets convenience and the other gets a maze. Businesses love efficiency, and maybe this is efficient … for them. Fewer interruptions. Less staff time. A tidy system humming along like a Roomba that occasionally eats a sock but we still call it progress.

From my end, however, it doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like we replaced a simple, human moment with a perfectly organized delay.

We keep dressing inconvenience up in futuristic clothing and calling it improvement. We polish the surface until it gleams, and then we stop asking whether the thing underneath actually got better. The shine becomes the argument.

I’m not anti-technology. I like talking maps, movies on airplanes, and the ability to look up Marx brothers trivia at two in the morning. But somewhere along the way, convenience stopped meaning easier for humans and started meaning easier to manage humans. Those are not the same thing.

A real receptionist might put me on hold, sigh a little, shuffle papers, maybe even mispronounce my name. Imperfect. Slightly inefficient. Entirely human. And somehow, in all that friction, the task would get done in about thirty seconds. No voicemail ping-pong. No polite robot promising phone tag.

Progress should feel like a door opening. Lately it feels like an elevator panel where every button leads back to the lobby.

Maybe this is inevitable. Every generation invents new ways to save time, then spends the savings explaining why everything takes longer. Maybe Sally is the future, smiling her frictionless smile while we press numbers and wait to be returned to ourselves.

Still, I can’t shake the suspicion we’ve confused motion with movement, activity with action.
Because if I call a dentist during business hours and can’t reschedule my appointment, I’m not sure the system is efficient.

I am, however, pretty sure that it’s very, very proud of itself.

The Unbearable Wordiness of Being (Now with AI Assistance)

Once upon a time, email was the necessary evil that allowed us to communicate with people we didn’t want to talk to, without the messy intimacy of a phone call. It was quick, efficient, and blessedly ignorable. You could respond to your boss’s 800-word memo with a single, blessed “Sounds good.” You could “circle back” or “loop in” with minimal damage to your soul.

But now we have AI. And suddenly, every exchange feels like it’s being ghostwritten by the collective spirit of Emily Post and HAL 9000.

Are you excited for your coworkers to become way more verbose? To see every terse acknowledgment balloon into a novella dripping with artificial sincerity?

That “Sure thing” that once took three seconds to type will now arrive as:

“Absolutely, Scott! I couldn’t agree more with your insightful perspective on the Q3 outreach initiative. Your leadership continues to inspire not just results, but meaning.”

And oh, the joy of the inbox! Because who doesn’t want to live in a world where every small business owner, club organizer, and slightly unhinged neighbor can now generate sleek, hyper-personalized marketing copy at the push of a button?

The same algorithm that writes customer engagement emails for Fortune 500 brands is now helping your local lawn-care guy send out:

“Dear Valued Community Member, We here at Steve’s Turf Emporium appreciate the deep roots we’ve grown together.”

You used to be able to spot a spammer by the mangled syntax and questionable punctuation. Now you’ll be deleting messages that read like TED Talks.

And let’s talk about emotion. Remember when sincerity had that lovely, flawed human awkwardness? When you could tell your friend meant well, even if his condolence email read like it was typed through tears and misspellings?

Now you get to wonder if he wrote it himself or if he just clicked “Generate Message: Empathetic Tone.”

“Your loss is unimaginable, but please know that your strength in this difficult time is a beacon to us all.”

Lovely, touching ... and entirely machine-made.

We’ve entered the uncanny valley of correspondence, folks. The messages are smoother, the grammar impeccable, the tone perfectly calibrated. And yet, somehow, every word feels like it was written by someone who doesn’t quite mean it.

The worst part? The machines didn’t steal our humanity ... we handed it to them, neatly formatted, with a polite closing line and an optional P.S.

So yes, AI and email together are the ultimate productivity duo. We can all now communicate faster, better, longer, and with precisely the same amount of emptiness.

Sent from my AI.

Valentine's Day Rant

 

Valentine’s Day, oh Valentine’s Day: the holiday that convinces the world that love can be packaged in red wrapping, chocolate, and slightly awkward greeting cards.

Every commercial screams, “Show your love like never before!” But what does that mean? Send flowers? Buy overpriced jewelry? Present chalky candy hearts with goofy messages?

And chocolate. The ads imply that buying a heart-shaped box automatically turns you into a romantic genius. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. I can buy a chocolate heart the size of a small moon, but if I forget if you prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate, congratulations ... you’re now emotionally traumatized.

Then there’s dinner. Every restaurant ad shows candlelit perfection: soft music, laughter, clinking glasses. Not me. I sit in reality trying to get a reservation, navigating menus I can’t pronounce, and praying the dessert doesn’t come with a “romantic” sparkler that sets off the smoke alarm.

And let’s not forget the singles. Oh, the singles-targeted ads. “You deserve love too!” they whisper, while simultaneously suggesting that self-love can be purchased in candle sets, bath bombs, or a subscription box of existential reassurance.

Valentine’s Day: where marketers make billions convincing humans that love is a product, chocolate is a solution, and social media likes are evidence of affection.

Shake Things Up: Go Old

You can almost hear the conference room fluorescent lights hum when someone says: “We need fresh thinking.”

Then right on cue, a parade of resumes of under 30 candidates hits the table like it’s a casting call for a toothpaste commercial instead of hiring brains to solve real-world messes.

Because youth = innovation, right?

Wrong. There’s a whole other group who actually invented half the “fresh thinking” you’re now desperately clawing toward. They’re experienced older candidates ... and when you overlook them, you shoot creativity in the kneecap.

The Myth: Experience makes you rigid.

The Reality: Experience makes you dangerous.

Folks over 50 aren’t polishing nostalgia on a shelf. They’ve been through the spreadsheet wars. They’ve survived bosses with “synergy” tattooed on their brains. They’ve watched “disruption” rise, fall, rise again, and get a TED Talk sponsorship.

And after all that?

They’re not here to politely nod at the same old “big idea” disguised with a new gradient color palette. They’re here to poke the system with a stick and see what yelps.

They ask the provocative questions. The ones everyone else is too scared to say aloud because they might derail the “Let’s all agree we’re brilliant” vibe. Stuff like:

“Why are we doing this the hard way?”

“What if we stopped worshiping the data and actually listened to the humans?”

“Has anyone noticed this idea is just last year’s idea wearing sunglasses?”

“What if we do the exact opposite?”

Those aren’t questions. Those are creative grenades.

Boom! Out goes the boring. In comes the unexpected, the unpolished, the uncomfortable, the actual spark.

They’ve seen the conventional answers. Which means they’re free to chase the un-conventional ones. They’ve run the playbook, highlighted the margins, folded the dog-ears, and realized something powerful:

Innovation isn’t youth. Innovation is courage. And experience tends to grow a thick, gorgeous layer of “I really don’t care if this idea scares you.” That’s rocket fuel.

If you want groupthink, go young. If you want novelty that’s really just nostalgia in sneakers? Young again. But if you want someone who’ll flip the table, question the premise, rewrite the problem, and mean it? Hire someone who’s lived a few creative lives already. They’re not trying to prove they belong anymore. They’re trying to make something worth belonging to.

So, stop treating experience like it’s a dusty file cabinet and start treating it like it’s dynamite with opinions. The future doesn’t belong to the youngest thinkers. It belongs to the boldest. And bold only happens when you’ve seen enough to know what’s worth breaking.

Bring in the older candidates. Because “fresh thinking” isn’t always young. Sometimes it comes with silver hair and a wicked grin that says: “Alright kids, let’s blow the doors off this place.”