When asked what kind of newspaper column I write, I sometimes respond, “It is often about the depth charges of being human that bubble to the surface of everyday life.” Other times, I just say “human interest.”
Recently, two of those bubbles presented themselves to me.
I was in a grocery store and ran into a former co-worker who still worked where we’d worked together. We’d always gotten along well, and she and I had chatted a bit over the years at our workplace.
After we talked a touch about how we’d been since we last saw each other, I asked her how things were going at the old workplace. I expected to hear how she thought the organization was doing under its new leadership and/or a report on happenings in the lives of co-workers since I’d left — who’d retired, who’d been promoted, who’d left for another job, who was facing or had faced an illness, etc..
Instead she said she’d “made a big mistake” the previous day at work, and then, to my surprise, started to get choked up about it.
We didn’t go into what the mistake was. She just apologized for showing such emotion (“no apology necessary”) and said she felt she’d handled things rightly by telling on herself at work, rather than leaving the result of the mistake to evidence itself downstream. Then she consoled herself aloud, saying she had come to understand that the mistake, large as it loomed to her, would not be catastrophic or even significantly damaging to the organization.
And then we brought the conversation around to the more typical catching-up between former co-workers that I referred to earlier — who’d retired, etc.
After we parted,I found myself dwelling on our interaction, as is my way. As a friend of mine says, “Sometimes I think my mind only keeps me around for transportation.”
I thought about the ability I try to cultivate to beat myself with a feather instead of a baseball bat when I screw up, and then file away whatever I did in the “try not to repeat” cabinet in my brain.
I also thought about how much my former co-worker cared about doing her work well. I suspect there are some readers who see her getting so bent out of shape by an error at work to be more of a negative than a positive. I, on the other hand, felt a certain admiration for her caring so much. Then again, I’m someone who writes ten full drafts of a column, with plenty of tweaks (what I call “whittling”) between drafts, amounting to perhaps thirty hours poured into a column.
Then I considered how lately I’ve been reading about, thinking about, and writing about the potential artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, working together, have to push humans aside, beginning with our work. Recently I read a 2017 article by Maureen Dowd, entitled “Elon Musk’s Future Shock.” It is a deeply developed piece about what “tech stars” saw as the future of AI. It evidences that seeing AI as very possibly altering where, how, and even if human beings fit on this earth is not unduly alarmist thinking. All one has to do these nine years later is see how we humans are having trouble getting our arms around AI to confirm that fact.
Anyway, I imagined that AI might not make the same mistake my very human former co-worker had made. But if it did make such a mistake, I couldn’t picture it getting all choked up about it. Such tears belong to us humans, with all our warts and wonderfulness.
Then I left the wonderings and wanderings of my mind and returned to the immediate question of whether the peanut butter on my assigned shopping list should be creamy or crunchy, salted or unsalted, blanched or unblanched peanuts, honey added or no honey added, and so on and so forth.
Later on, I was at another store in a checkout line. A man and a woman were right ahead of me at the register. When it came time to pay, the man said to the cashier, “Does it matter who pays?” The cashier, a little surprised by a question she’d probably never heard from a couple before, said, “No.” The man then said to the cashier, “OK. You pay.” After a few seconds, first the guy, then the cashier, then I burst out laughing. The woman with the man did not. She’d probably heard the joke before.
When the man saw I was joining in the laughter, he held his fist out for a fist bump from me. I said, very genuinely, “That’s good! I’ll have to use it myself.” And then he and I bumped fists while the cashier looked on, grinning.
Somehow I can’t picture robots sharing such a moment of what the poet Allen Ginsberg called “real holy laughter.” One robot might say the words, and a robot cashier might emit the sound of laughter, but connective chuckles belong to those of us in the animal kingdom. To share a moment of heartfelt laughter, you need a heart.
Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.