The Sandwich

The kitchen still smelled like Sunday’s roast.

Grant sat at the dining table with his tie loosened, turning his phone over and over. “They sat me down today,” he said. “Everything goes through the new system now. Reports, summaries, all of it. Not optional.”

“Okay,” Bec said. “And?”

“And there’s a kid they hired in March.” He put the phone down. Picked it back up. “Twenty-two years I’ve done this job, and I sat in that room nodding along like I understood.”

Bec crossed the kitchen and sat down beside him. “They’re not firing you.”

“No.” He turned the phone over again. “That’s not the part.”

She waited.

“Nobody’s going to fire me,” Grant said. “They’re just going to stop walking over to my desk.”

That was when his daughter, Nell, came in for a snack, grabbing half a granola bar already unwrapped. She stopped. “Everything okay?”

“Your dad’s had himself a day,” Bec said.

Nell looked at her mother first, checking. Then she pulled out a chair and sat down, the granola bar forgotten in her hand.

“Yeah.” He stumbled. “No. There’s this thing at work. Called AI.”

“Dad! I know about that. We’ve been using it at school.”

He raised an eyebrow and leaned back.

“Oh, yeah.”

Bec piped in, “Your Dad’s stuck on how to use it.”

“Can I — this is kind of how I do it?”

Grant looked up, surprised.

“You make the rough thing first. Just yours, even if it’s bad.” She was talking faster now. “Then you hand it over and it does the middle part, the sorting and the tidying. And then, um.”

She stopped. She had never talked to her father like this before, and she could hear it.

Grant set the phone face down on the table.

“And then what,” he said. Not a challenge. He was asking.

Nell looked at him for a second longer than she needed to. “And then you get it back, and you make it sound like you again. That part nobody else can do.”

“How many things do you change?”

“I change big things. Small ones. Things that need changing with words I’d actually say.”

Grant nodded slowly, the way he nodded at work, except this time he was doing the arithmetic behind it.

“So three parts,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Me. Then AI. Then me again.”

Nell smiled. “The teach calls it an intelligence sandwich.”

And Bec snapped her fingers. “That does sound like a sandwich to me,” she said, already up and reaching for the cupboard. “Anybody want one?”

Grant nodded along in that meeting like he understood when he actually didn’t. You’ve done it. Probably this month.

So…think of somebody at least ten years younger than you who knows something you don’t. Ask them one question about it this week.

Not to be nice. Not as a conversation starter. Ask because you actually want the answer, and let them see that you do.

The hard part isn’t the asking.

It’s not explaining first why you don’t already know.

If this resonated, feel free to forward it to someone who’s trying to stay human in the age of AI.