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.