Experience Starvation

There was a guy I worked with at the post office. Name was Delgado. He’d been sorting mail for thirty-one years. Knew every route in the district by feel — which streets flooded, which dogs bit, which old ladies left water out on the porch in August.

When I started, he didn’t say much. Just watched me fumble with the trays for a week. Then one morning he said, “You’re stacking the flats wrong.” Showed me once. That was the training program. Thirty-one years of knowing compressed into four words and a gesture.

The Machine That Never Judges You

The landlord’s kid came by to fix the radiator last week. Twenty-three years old, engineering degree from somewhere that costs more than my car. He stood there with his phone out, asking ChatGPT how to bleed a radiator valve.

I watched him wait for the answer like a dog waiting for the treat to drop. The phone told him what to do. He did it. The radiator worked. And I sat there thinking about how his grandfather would’ve just known.

Six Thousand Liars

The woman at the bar was explaining to her friend why she’d put twenty thousand dollars into a time-share in Cancún. “It’s an investment,” she said, and her friend nodded the way you nod when someone tells you their kid is gifted.

I sat there nursing my glass and thinking about six thousand CEOs.

The National Bureau of Economic Research — the real one, not some blog with a mission statement — went and surveyed six thousand C-suite executives from companies with actual revenue. They asked the question nobody in Silicon Valley wants asked out loud: is any of this AI spending actually paying off?

The Slippers

The guy took his shoes off at work. Not because he was comfortable — because he’d given up. Twelve hours a day, six days a week, in a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco’s Dogpatch, and at some point the formal pretense of footwear seemed like one lie too many.

I used to sort mail at the post office. Eight hours, sometimes ten if someone called in sick or drunk or both. We wore shoes because the floor was filthy and because there was a union and because nobody pretended we were building the future. We were moving paper from one pile to another. The pay was bad, the supervisors were worse, and at five o’clock you walked out the door and the building didn’t follow you home.

Everyone Knows Better Than the Guy Getting Paid

The guy at the end of the bar was explaining to nobody in particular why Tottenham sacked their manager. He had theories. Everyone has theories. That’s the beautiful thing about football — eight billion people on this planet and every last one of them knows better than the guy getting paid to do it.

Thirty-one managerial changes this season across the English football pyramid. Thirty-one men shown the door, handed a check, told their vision wasn’t quite right. Forty-eight of the ninety-two current managers have been in their job for less than twelve months. My last landlord gave me more time than that, and he hated my guts.

The Golden Excuse

The woman at the unemployment office had a sign on her desk that said “We’re Here To Help!” with an exclamation point. The exclamation point is how you know they’re not.

She asked me what I did before. I told her I used to write. She typed something into her computer and said there weren’t many openings for that anymore. I said I’d heard.

That’s the line now, isn’t it? The machines took the jobs. The AI ate your position. Sorry, friend, the algorithm does it faster, cheaper, and it doesn’t need bathroom breaks or health insurance or the will to live.

Back to Asking Around at the Bar

The bourbon was down to the dregs, the ice had surrendered hours ago, and I was staring at a headline that made me pour another inch anyway.

“If You’re a Real Person Looking for a Job, the Flood of Fake AI Job Applications Will Make Your Blood Boil.”

Good. Let it boil. Maybe the heat will kill something.

A tech publication called The Markup posted a job for an engineer. Within twelve hours, they had four hundred applications. Most of them fake. AI-generated slop from bots wearing human masks, feeding carefully crafted lies assembled by other machines.

Unprepared for What Has Already Happened

The ice had melted in my glass by the time I finished reading. Cheap bourbon, watered down now, like everything else these days.

Some NPR guy — Ira Glass, the “This American Life” host — built a whole episode around a phrase that hit me like a kidney punch: “Unprepared for what has already happened.”

Read that again. Not unprepared for what’s coming. Unprepared for what’s already happened.

That’s the cruelest part. The future everyone warned us about showed up while we were still arguing whether it was real. The robots aren’t coming. They’re here. They’ve been here. And most of us are still standing at the station waiting for a train that left three years ago.