Six old friends, one soda fountain, and a question nobody could answer

The summer of 2006. Six high school friends, now in their 50s, sit in an In-N-Out Burger in Oakland, California, having lunch before an A’s vs. White Sox game. Three attorneys, a physician, a consultant, and a movie critic wrestle with the serious ethical question dividing the table:

Is it okay to refill your soda at a self-serve fountain if you didn’t pay for unlimited refills?

I’m firmly pro-refill. Barb often complains that wherever we eat, the server somehow manages to refill my iced tea while completely ignoring hers. And if there’s a self-serve soda station nearby, I’m probably making two or three trips.

The six of us never reached agreement that afternoon. Like many great philosophical disputes, it ended without resolution and with several empty cups on the table. But this week, nearly twenty years later, I asked ChatGPT for its opinion on the ethics of the uncompensated refill.

Its answer was surprisingly nuanced. Taking extra soda probably violates the restaurant’s intended pricing model, it explained, but “quietly topping off a soda is not equivalent to serious theft.” Most people, according to the robot ethicist, would view it as “a minor norms question rather than a major ethical failing.”

Good news for me. I apparently do not suffer from a major ethical failing.

Still, millions of unpaid cups of Coca-Cola may be helping reshape the fast-food business model. McDonald’s was in the news last week as it continued moving toward eliminating self-serve drink stations from all locations by 2032. The company says the change is meant to “create a consistent experience for workers and customers in restaurants, at the drive-thru and in the app.”

But we know better.

Too many people violating minor norms.

My friends and I are already planning our next ballpark trip. We don’t yet know where or when we are going, but it will undoubtedly involve baseball, unhealthy food, and spirited debate.

And hopefully, we’ll discover another moral dilemma worthy of twenty years of contention.

A broken dishwasher leads to an unexpected trip behind the showroom

When an error code kept appearing on our dishwasher, Barb and I called Abt.
“You don’t want to spend money servicing an appliance that’s probably near the end of its useful life,” the rep gently coaxed.

We said we’d think about it. Within minutes, we had our answer. Replacing the dishwasher felt like cheap insurance against a kitchen disaster.

We always look forward to a trip to the massive, dog-friendly appliance and electronics store in Glenview. We loaded Cooper into the back seat and drove off to adult Disney World.

Because it was late afternoon on a weekday, the store was nearly empty—plenty of sales staff in their ABT vests, and one of them, David, quickly approached us. We explained our situation; he tapped a few keys and scrolled through the long list of appliances we’d bought there until he found the model number of our failing dishwasher.

He brought us to the line of dishwashers on the showroom floor. “Since you have a custom cabinet panel, this is what you want. I’m about 90% sure it’ll fit.”

The price of the machine was quite a bit more than we expected. Apparently, dishwashers have not been immune to the last decade.

David had a possible solution.

“I think we have an unboxed one of these in our storage space,” he said.

“Why would it be unboxed?” Barb asked.

“It was probably delivered, but couldn’t be installed for one reason or another. If you want it, I’ll give you 30% off. Why don’t we go take a look?”

David copied a number from the inventory list and led the way, Cooper sniffing at his heels. We walked out of the store into the central atrium, its fountain shooting water up toward the dome—a miniature Bellagio. We passed through the specialty luggage and iPhone stores until we came to a locked door marked Employees Only. David entered a code and ushered us in.

This was a part of the Abt universe few customers ever see.

We stepped into a dimly lit space the size of a football field, filled with rows of unboxed appliances. “Returns and old floor models,” David said.

I wasn’t sure who we’d encounter next—Wall-E on his cleaning rounds or Indiana Jones hunting for the ark.

David led us through the gloomy maze until he found it; the naked, unboxed dishwasher, its insulation exposed like something not meant to be seen. But as sad as it looked, David assured us, it would fit perfectly into our kitchen.

We placed the order. Delivery is this afternoon. Will it fit? We hope so. I’d hate to have to send it back to that warehouse of lost souls, the part of Disney World visitors never get to see.

Every showplace has its dark side.

Getting pooped out of the pop-ups.

If an app can be a friend, Grammarly was one of mine for years. I can’t recall when I first discovered the program that installed my Oxford commas, kept me from using “their” instead of “they’re,” and reinforced the lesson of my high school English teacher that “it’s” means “it is.”

On the fly, Grammarly redlined my awkward constructions while giving my simple posts a polished appearance. I could not imagine life without her. Yes, she was definitely female.

But as of today, our relationship has ended. I have scrubbed her from my Chrome browser and from everywhere else on my desktop computer. I will see her no more.

Her sin? Greed.

It started with a pop-up ad that couldn’t be shaken or avoided. Everywhere I placed my cursor to type, whether in an email, a Facebook comment, or this blog, an ad pitching Grammarly Pro appeared. The pop-ups were not huge, but they were just large enough to block what I was typing, and relentlessly persistent. I would close one, only to have it reappear with my next keystroke.

I understand that a company cannot survive forever by giving away its product for free. I subscribe to and pay for a number of programs that make my online life more pleasant and productive. I might even have considered paying a modest subscription fee to Grammarly, but the in-your-face advertising, as obnoxious as any street vendor we encountered last week in New York City, was a deal breaker.

So please forgive the occasional lapse in spelling and grammar. I promise to do my best. It won’t be Grammarly perfect, but I will try to make it Raff immaculate, without getting in anybody’s face.

From airlines to AI, does the decision really matter?

I might as well flip a coin.

American or United to New York. Home Depot or Menards for duct tape. Substack or WordPress. Different decisions, same result. It often feels interchangeable.

Now I’m facing another choice, and I’m not at all sure it will turn out any differently.

I’ve been using ChatGPT for over three years. It’s helped with my writing, my consulting work, and even the occasional village issue. It’s fast, agreeable, and, if I’m being honest, rarely tells me I’m wrong.

But after a bike ride the other day, our daughter Laury said I should try something else: Claude.

Laury likes the way Claude helps her pull spreadsheets together and turn them into clean, usable reports. I can see the appeal. When I was running laboratories, that kind of help would have saved hours. Sometimes days. It often felt like it took a week just to assemble a monthly report from all the different sources.

But that’s not my life anymore. Even the consulting I do now is lighter, less data-driven. I’m not merging spreadsheets or tracking trends across thousands of cases. I’m writing. Thinking. Revising.

So the question, for me, is simpler. Which one helps me do that better?

I know what ChatGPT gives me. The tone, the speed, the steady encouragement.

Now I’ll see what Claude does.

Maybe this turns out to be another one of those interchangeable choices. Door #1 or Door #2.

How a quiet Canasta game turned me into a Joker

The rec room is warm and humid, carrying the faint aroma of sugary snacks. At five scattered card tables, automatic shufflers whir, and plastic tiles clack. Players study their hands, waiting. Cries of “Crack!” and “Bam!” and “Splash!” erupt from every corner. There are twenty-five Canasta and Mahjong players. Twenty-four women, and me.

I volunteered to play Canasta with some of Barb’s friends, helping fill out a table at their weekly game. I played a few hands with Barb before she rotated to another table, but now, for the first time in my brief Canasta career, I have a different partner.

I’m holding my own, following the rules and keeping a reasonable pace. I’ve made one mistake, discarding a card that should have gone into my partner’s meld, but she graciously waved it off. I hope it doesn’t cost us the game. Then again, we’re only playing for fun, not money. Not even pennies.

The game continues. I bend forward to pick up my next card, and suddenly something seizes in the back of my right leg. The pain is immediate and intense, and I rise in agony. I steady myself against the table as my partner calls out to Barb, “I think Les needs help!”

Barb sees my face, then my hand reaching for the back of my thigh. We both know what this is: a muscle cramp, severe enough to stop me in my tracks. With her years of experience as an occupational therapist, she also knows exactly what to do.

She steps behind me and places one hand on my shoulder. With the other, she presses firmly into the back of my thigh, working the muscle with steady, practiced movements. We rock slightly as I try to ride out the pain.

I realize the room has gone silent and look up to see twenty-three women staring at us in amazement. I can almost hear what they’re thinking: Are they really doing this here?

Barb senses it too. “It’s ok,” she says. “He’s my husband. And it’s only a cramp.”

The pain eases enough for me to send Barb back to her table. I’m not ready to sit yet, so I play standing. In this awkward position, I knock the refreshments off the table behind me.

As I do, the woman next to me shakes her head and says, “Can’t take him anywhere.”

And I know the others, Barb included, agree.

What the two of us have in common.

In last week’s blog post, I called myself out for becoming too dependent on AI in my writing. While I will still use various “other brains” for proofreading and grammar refinement (skipping the 5th grade leads to various holes in grammarian knowledge), ChatGPT and others will no longer suggest topics, provide outlines, or come up with clever quips to fill my word quota.

It looks like my post has been inspirational to other writers. Today’s New York Times features a Guest Editorial by Colson Whitehead. The title of the Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer’s piece: Don’t Use A.I. to Do This. The “this” in question? Creating. As Mr. Whitehead says:

Write the piece, not the prompt.

Of course, the author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys says it a lot more elegantly and humorously than I ever could. In his defense of creativity, he blends in references to Dostoevsky (yes, I had to look up how to spell the name), Edgar Allan Poe (did not have to look up), and the intro to Law and Order. Even with the help of 6th-generation super-advanced AI, I don’t think I could accomplish that particular weave. I don’t even think that Donald Trump could.

I’m glad to know, or at least hypothesize, that my post inspired an author who has been listed for every existent literary prize since the invention of the printing press to write his essay. Or at least to know that great minds think alike.

Mr. Whitehead will go back to writing all his great novels, and I’ll continue my somewhat shorter blog posts. As for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and all their kin? Go write some code and leave us creators alone!

and feeling good about it.

This morning, There’s a Good Reason Why You Can’t Concentrate, an opinion piece in today’s New York Times, caught my eye. Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, compared our nation’s current mental laxity to our pre-1950s physical laxity. According to Newport, the latter was improved (at least to some extent) following the detailed reporting of President Eisnehower’s heart attack and publication of the book Aerobics. Mr. Newport suggested a few steps that could improve our mental acuity in a similar fashion.

It was the section on the risks and rewards of A.I. that grabbed me. While he acknowledged A.I.’s usefulness, Newport insisted that “your writing should be your own.” And that made me think. How much of my writing is still my own?

I started writing my blog in 2015, before various A.I. tools became available. Every word, sentence, and paragraph I typed was my own. I also owned every grammatical error, clunky sentence, and inconsistent conclusion.

The incursion of artificial assistants started slowly. Grammarly opened the door, correcting errors in my grammar and spelling that a more polished writer would find on their own. My participles stopped dangling.

Next, a conversation with a neighbor introduced me to DALL-E, a program trained to create illustrations from written prompts. Suddenly, my opening pictures went from the cut-and-paste smorgasbord I had been creating in Microsoft Paint to DALL-E’s clever cartoon caricatures.

In completing my evolution, ChatGPT has become my best writing buddy. I have used it as an editor, a prompter, and a polisher. For illustrations, it is more precise than DALL-E with a wider variety of styles.

ChatGPT cuts the time it takes me to complete a blog post in half. I ignore some of its suggestions while embracing others, ultimately creating a weave.

The program assures me that it is writing in my voice. Over time though, I can feel that voice fading, replaced by a digital one created in a data center, perhaps somewhere in the Mojave Desert.

But after reading Mr. Newport’s piece, my post today is different. Grammarly is turned off, and nothing on this page has been suggested or proofread by ChatGPT. It’s my own effort, or lack thereof.

For today, I am all you get. I’m sure you will be able to pick out some mistakes. But it feels like the old way — and it feels good.*

Finding the one line in a long-awaited email

I saw the email this morning and had a good idea of what it would say.

It was from the Associate Artistic Director of the theater festival where I had submitted White Collar, my first play. I had been waiting for this message since last fall, when I sent in what was, improbably, the fourteenth revision of the script.

The note was about 150 words long. Polite. Professional. Appreciative of the number and quality of submissions. I moved through the first paragraph, then into the second, looking for the sentence that mattered.

It was there, near the end:

“Unfortunately, your play was not selected for the 2026 award.”

No surprise. Not really.

I had followed all the requirements. The play fit the format, the length, and the cast size. But those are only the price of admission. They don’t get you selected.

I’d be lying if I said I felt nothing. There was a brief pause after reading it—a small, quiet deflation. Not enough to ruin the day, but enough to notice.

Then, just as quickly, it passed.

I’ve already moved on to another project, Lines of Memory, a fictionalized history of several generations of my family. That’s the nature of this kind of work. You write, you revise, you send it out, and more often than not, you hear “no.”

If I keep at it, I expect to accumulate a respectable collection of those emails.

But I also hope that one day I’ll read far enough to find a different sentence waiting for me.

And for now, that’s reason enough to keep going.

I took the risk. The risk won.

When I told you last week about the return of Mini-Snickers Ice Cream bars to grocery store shelves, I mentioned the little tag at the end of the ingredients: “May Contain Wheat.” And I said it was worth taking a chance on my favorite ice cream confection—Celiac disease be damned. Maybe, just maybe, that wasn’t the best idea…

The bars were just as I remembered: whipped ice cream, caramel, and half a peanut. They made a wonderful after-dinner snack, each bar weighing in at less than 100 calories. They were a perfect complement to a steaming cup of decaf tea after all the dinner dishes had been washed and put away.

But after a day or two, I began to notice my stomach rumbling a bit more than usual. There was no pain, but a mild sense of discomfort pervaded my body. Being me, I ignored it and kept eating one bar each night.

And so I made it through the first box. Last night, I opened box #2.

The two boxes were side by side in the grocer’s freezer aisle. I am sure both were made at the same plant—probably during the same shift. But within a few minutes of my first Snickers from the second box, my mild discomfort had been transformed into a full-blown gluten attack. I knew that for box #2, “May Contain Wheat” could be better quantified as “Absolutely, positively loaded with it.”

I gambled, and I lost. The house, it turns out, always wins, and I’ll be paying the price for a day or two more. But for a few moments, I enjoyed a treat that I thought had long ago been lost to me.

I consider that a decent pay-off—or at least, breaking even.

The end of a four-year quest in the freezer aisle at Woodman’s

Are you a long-time reader of my blog? If you are, you might remember a post from four years ago in which I lamented the post-COVID disappearance of Mini-Snickers Ice Cream Bars from grocery store freezer shelves. I told of my impossible quest to find my favorite after-dinner treats.

Many readers suggested I buy the full-size bars and cut them in half — a King Solomon “cut the baby in two” solution. I have steadfastly refused. So for four years, my diet has been Mini-Snickers Ice Cream Bars free.

Until today.

While pushing my cart through the ice-cream novelties aisle at Woodman’s, I did my customary check. And there they were. Rows and rows of my favorite treat.

Some things have changed. The box now contains 10 bars instead of an even dozen. And while a check of the ingredients doesn’t reveal any obvious sources of gluten, there is a warning that the bars “may contain wheat.” That is something I wasn’t concerned with before my Celiac diagnosis three years ago.

That warning is not enough to deter me. I bought a box. (OK, I bought two.)

Tonight will be the test as I have my first taste. Will it be as good as I remembered? Will I avoid a reaction to a smidgen of gluten that may be in them? Will my perseverance pay off?

Keep your fingers crossed for me. I’m hoping Friday the 13th is my lucky day!