Descendant of Trekkers & a Stubborn Ouma

In my family’s history, few threads stand out as vividly as those woven by my Ouma Joey, Johanna Maria Magdalena, to give her full name. She was a force of nature, a woman who chain-smoked her way through life until emphysema claimed her in the eighties. I remember visiting her just before the end, watching her gasp for breath like a fish hauled from the water, her chest heaving with the effort of simply existing. That image seared itself into my mind, a warning that steered me clear of cigarettes forever. Even dagga, with its foul, acrid stench, has no appeal, disgusting stuff, and worse for the lungs. I have no idea about why stoners use it. Ouma’s struggle was my silent vow: I’d never let smoke steal my air or life.

But Ouma Joey was more than her vices; she was the keeper of our clan’s lore, always reminding us that we were part of the proud Maritz lineage. Her mother had been a Maritz before marrying a Bruyns, and Ouma never let a family gathering pass without invoking that heritage. “We’re Maritz blood,” she’d declare in her strong Afrikaans ascent, her voice raspy from years of tobacco. To her, it meant we descended from heroes of the Great Trek, that epic northward migration of Dutch-speaking settlers fleeing British rule in the Cape Colony two centuries ago. Gert Maritz was one of those legendary Voortrekker leaders, a wagon builder and resourceful recruiter who guided the Boer families from Graaff-Reinet across the Orange River into the interior. He wasn’t just a farmer; he was a provisional field cornet, as well as a skilled artisan who kept the trek’s machinery rolling through harsh terrain. His group joined others in the push for freedom, establishing laagers and facing down threats from indigenous groups like the Ndebele. Tragically, Gert died of the lurgy at Sooilaer, near the Tugela River, but his legacy as a steady, principled leader endured. Ouma saw him as the true hero—a man of action and integrity, not the flashier figures who stole the spotlight.

And oh, how she’d rail against his nemesis, Piet Retief. To Ouma, Retief was no shining icon but an unsavory opportunist, a clumsy hero elevated by Afrikaner mythology more through folly than foresight. Piet Retief, born to Huguenot descendants, had a checkered past: repeated bankruptcies from failed land speculations and livestock ventures, losses in Xhosa raids, and a knack for financial missteps that left him deep in debt. He commanded expeditions in the Xhosa Wars and became a voice for disgruntled frontier farmers, penning a manifesto decrying British policies like inadequate slave compensation after abolition. In the Great Trek, Retief emerged as a leader, elected governor of the united laagers and pushing for settlement in Natal. He negotiated with Zulu King Dingane for land, recovering stolen cattle as part of the deal, but his trust proved fatal. He and his men were massacred at Dingane’s kraal, unarmed and ambushed during a supposed celebration. Ouma called it stupidity, not strategy; Retief’s naivety sparked the Battle of Blood River and cemented his martyrdom, but she insisted it was his fate, even divine intervention.

What galled her most was how Retief had insulted Gert Maritz along the way. Notably that last day when he went to Dingaan’s kraal and rode past Maritz’s wagon and called him a lafaard. During the trek, leadership tensions boiled over: Retief was voted governor and chief commandant, while Maritz was relegated to president and judge, a setup that exacerbated rivalries among the Voortrekkers. Maritz and others clashed with Retief, and Ouma spun it as a direct slight to the Maritz Clan, overshadowing his contributions. Even Pietermaritzburg, the city named for both (originally Pieter Maritz Burg), felt like a grudging nod to her hero. “Retief got the glory,” she’d grumble, “but Maritz was the one with honour.”

Ouma embodied that Afrikaner spirit in her daily life. She spoke only Afrikaans, dishing out tripe and kop en pootjies, those hearty, offal-heavy stews that warmed the soul on chilly evenings. I’d avoid it but it was my brother’s favourite meal. We’d gather around the table for card games, where she’d accuse my brother Andre of cheating with a sharp tongue and a wink. My mom confided that Ouma wasn’t the ideal mother; society parties and social climbing often trumped raising her daughter. Ouma would tell us about those events, like when the King of England hosted a Ball at the Maritzburg Town Hall and she met Lillibet. But Mom adored her father, JT Elliot, a steady presence who passed when I was just a year old in the late sixties. When Ouma died, she left no inheritance—just memories and that unyielding pride in our roots.

Die Klein Kerk te Noodsberg

Tucked away in the backwaters of Natal, where the air hangs heavy with the molasses scent from the massive Noodsberg sugar mill, stands a modest little Kerk that feels like a relic from another era. Noodsberg is mostly that hulking mill, churning out sugar from the vast cane fields that stretch green around the surrounding area. Right next door is Bruyns Hill, a gentle rise that marks the boundary of my Ouma family’s old stomping grounds. The Kerk, part of the NG Kerk, the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk, that bastion of Afrikaner Calvinism, isn’t much to look at: a simple structure with a handful of wooden pews polished smooth by generations of faithful bums, and an old organ that wheezed hymns like Ouma clearing her throat.

Behind the church lies the real heart of the place: a quiet graveyard where so many of my ancestors’ rest. Maritzes, Bruynses, and others from Ouma Joey’s line, their headstones weathered by rain and time, etched with long forgotten dates, from just after the Trek and beyond. It’s as if the soil there holds the echoes of their footsteps, those granite hard Voortrekkers who pushed north in search of freedom. We’d visit occasionally, dragged along by Ouma Joey, who insisted on attending services despite her raspy cough. “Dis ons kerk,” she’d say in her unyielding Afrikaans. For her, it was more than worship; it was a pilgrimage to honor the dead and remind us, the remaining ones, of where we came from.

The church was so small that us kids were often spared the stuffy confines inside. While the adults filed in for the dominee’s sermon, we’d scamper outside, climbing the gnarled Jacaranda trees that dotted the grounds or wandering among the gravestones like little explorers in a forgotten world. Those trees were our playgrounds, sturdy branches perfect for perching, leaves rustling in the quiet Sunday breeze. I have this recurring dream even now: I’m up in one of those trees, legs dangling, peering through the window at the dominee in his pulpit, his voice booming out in rhythmic Afrikaans about sin, salvation, and the wrath of God. From my leafy vantage, it all seemed so distant, like a performance in a foreign pantomime.

At that tender age, I couldn’t shake the confusion. This NG Kerk God felt different from the one in the Lutheran services or Methodist gatherings we’d sometimes attend with other family branches. If it was the same God—the same creator watching over us all—why the separate churches? Why the different rituals, the varying hymns, the divided flocks? Were the Lutherans worshiping a kinder deity, the Methodists a more forgiving one, and the NG Kerk folks a stricter version? Ouma Joey would ignore my questions with a wave of her cigarette hand, and roll her eyes, but they lingered. Even today, I don’t have a satisfying answer. Maybe it’s human nature to carve up the divine into factions, each claiming their slice of truth. Or perhaps it’s just the way history fractures faith, like light through a prism. Whatever the reason, those childhood moments outside the Noodsberg Kerk, amid the trees and graves, planted seeds of doubt that grew into a lifelong pondering. In the shadow of that sugar mill, the mysteries of belief remain unanswered. And that suits me fine, as I recall my dad, Mastelek, telling me that you will rarely ever find two Afrikaners agreeing about a subject. I think he meant the whole of humanity.

Grey

One tangible gift lingers in my regrets: the blanket Joey gave me when I headed to Grey College. It was a homemade woollen crochet piece of multiple coloured stripes, a Navajo-style heirloom I called the “Maritz blanket,” thick and warm against the Free State’s biting winters. I slept under it through those frigid nights in hostel, feeling connected to the trekkers’ endurance. I wish I still had it, a threadbare link to Ouma Joey and the clan she refused to let us forget. In her stories, we weren’t just descendants; we were heirs to a legacy of resilience, forged in ox wagons rolling north through the plains under vast African skies.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

My Cowboy Obsession

Growing up on our farm in the rolling hills of the Natal Midlands, thousands of miles from the American West, I became utterly converted to the life of a cowboy. It started innocently enough, I’d beg for cowboy outfits on my birthdays, complete with hats, vests, and toy holsters. I’d fall asleep under a thick cowboy-themed blanket patterned with Navajo motifs, and my everyday wardrobe leaned heavily into plaid shirts, sturdy corduroy pants, and those classic Grasshopper leathers that felt just rugged enough for imaginary roundups. In my mind, the dusty trails of Arizona were as real as the green pastures surrounding our home.

Before television entered our lives, entertainment came from the old projector in the dining room. We’d dim the lights, crank the machine, and watch flickering black-and-white images dance across the white wall. Classics like High Noon with Gary Cooper stood out, I remember us watching it multiple times, mesmerized by the tension and heroism. Those projector nights fueled my dreams of the Wild West.

Then came the Telefunken TV, a monumental arrival that opened up new worlds. Shows like Bonanza were popular, with the Cartwright family on their sprawling Ponderosa ranch, but to me, they were a bunch of poefters, too polished, too tame. The real deal, the one that gripped me completely, was The High Chaparral. Created by David Dortort (the same man behind Bonanza), this series ran in the States in the late sixties, reaching us a decade later and followed the tough Cannon family as they battled to build a cattle empire on their ranch in the harsh Arizona Territory of the 1870s, just outside Tucson. “Big John” Cannon, played by Leif Erickson, was the determined patriarch; his roguish brother Buck (Cameron Mitchell), son Blue (Mark Slade), and later his new wife Victoria (Linda Cristal)—daughter of the powerful Mexican rancher Don Sebastian Montoya—and her charming brother Manolito (Henry Darrow) added layers of family drama, cultural clashes, and high-stakes adventure amid Apache raids and border tensions.

I’d make every effort to be planted in front of that TV when it aired. It was immersive in a way nothing else was, the gritty realism of the outdoor filming in the actual Arizona desert transported me completely. Suddenly, I was there in the sun-baked landscape, riding alongside the Cannons, feeling the dust and danger. It wasn’t just entertainment; it was an escape, a hundred years back in time.

To this day, decades later, I still revisit the episodes. It takes months to work through them all, savoring each one, but it’s pure enjoyment, a timeless reminder of the boy on a Midlands farm who found his heroes in the High Chaparral.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

A Precious Relic of Treks & Tea

In the quiet corners of my family’s history, few objects carry as much weight or warmth, as the Maritz urn. This antique brass vessel, a water carrier designed to keep its contents hot with the gentle flicker of an oil lamp beneath, was more than a mere kitchen implement. It was a companion for brewing tea or coffee, its polished surface reflecting generations of care and conversation. My mother tended to it her entire life, rubbing it to a gleam with Brasso, as if each stroke preserved not just the metal but the stories etched into its curves.

The Maritz urn is a samovar — a traditional metal water-boiling urn, most commonly used for making tea or other beverages.

The samover has:

• Brass body with decorative elements → very typical of older samovars
• Tap/spigot near the bottom → for dispensing hot water
• Lid on top → usually where a small teapot would sit to stay warm
• Raised legs → originally designed so a heat source (charcoal or alcohol burner) could sit underneath
• Side handles (often wood or insulated) → for carrying when hot

Traditionally, samovars were used in Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. It was introduced into South Africa by the Cape Malay community and then assimilated by the Dutch farmers who would become the Boers and later the Afrikaners. Water would be kept hot in the main chamber, while strong tea concentrate sat in a small pot on top and was diluted with hot water when served.

The urn came to my mother Lenore through her mother, and before that from her grandmother, a woman married to a Bruyns but born a Maritz, a direct descendant of Gert Maritz, the Voortrekker leader whose name graces Pietermaritzburg. My Ouma Joey, full name Maria Magdalena, was christened after Gert Maritz’s wife, a nod to the resilient women who anchored these wandering families. I like to imagine the urn’s journey began in the voorkamer of the Maritz home in Graaff-Reinet, where it stood sentinel, dispensing moerkoffie, that strong, black brew that fueled late-night debates and early-morning resolves.

Graaff-Reinet in the 1830s was a hotbed of discontent among the Dutch-speaking farmers, chafing under British rule. It was there, amid the Cape Dutch gables and dusty streets, that plans for the Groot Trek were hatched. The urn would have been present, steaming away, as Gert Maritz and his kin discussed the grievances: the loss of land, perceived injustices, and the imposition of English laws that eroded their way of life. Alliances formed over cups of its hot offering, whispers of migration northward turning into firm resolves.

When the time came, Gert Maritz led his party of some 100 strong ox wagaons from Graaff-Reinet, crossing the Orange River into the vast interior. The trek was no gentle stroll; it was a grueling odyssey over rugged terrain, battling rivers, thirst, and threats from wildlife and warring tribes. The path to Natal wound through the highveld, skirting conflicts with the Ndebele under Mzilikazi, whom the trekkers eventually drove northward after battles like Mosega. Then came the formidable Drakensberg Mountains, a barrier of jagged peaks rising like a dragon’s spine. Wagons were dismantled, wheels removed, and heavy branches lashed underneath as makeshift brakes to ease the descent down the 3,500-meter slopes. Amid this chaos, the urn would have been carefully packed in a wooden kist or perhaps a reused ship’s tea box, cushioned against the jolts of ox-drawn wagons that creaked over rocks and forded streams.

Once across the Drakensberg, the trekkers entered the lush valleys of Natal, but safety was fleeting. In laagers, those defensive circles of wagons drawn tight like a fist, the urn found new purpose. By night, it simmered moerkoffie for the watchmen, keeping them alert against Zulu raids or the encroaching darkness. Alliances among the trek parties were forged and frayed here too; discussions around campfires, warmed by the urn’s glow, debated routes and leadership. Gert Maritz, elected as a key figure alongside Hendrik Potgieter, embodied order amid the uncertainty.

It was in one such tense moment that the urn bore silent witness to history’s sharper edges. As Piet Retief prepared to ride to Dingane’s kraal, seeking land grants from the Zulu king, he made a final pass by Maritz’s tent. Maritz, weakened by illness and cautious of the risks, declined to join. Retief, ever the bold one, branded him a “lafaard” (a coward) before galloping off to his doom, where he and his party were massacred at uMgungundlovu. The urn, steadfast in the laager, outlasted the man, surviving the subsequent Zulu attacks that culminated in the Battle of Blood River later that year.

Gert Maritz himself died at his laager on the Little Tugela River, never fully dwelling in the promised land he helped claim. But the urn endured, passing down the female line as a symbol of hearth and heritage. In time, modern conveniences, electric kettles and thermal flasks, relegated it to ornament status, a gleaming heirloom in our homes, evoking the tenacity of those early settlers.

For generations, it remained in the possession of women, guardians of family lore. Somehow, it fell into my hands, a man’s kitchen seemed an unlikely resting place for such a feminine legacy. It sat in my own home for years, a quiet reminder of roots. But traditions have their pull; needing a home with another woman to carry on the polishing and the stories, I shipped it off to Megs using Pudo. Its there to warm her days as it did our ancestors’, a brass thread binding us across the treks of time and distance.

The Journey to Plettenberg Bay

The Samovar has now settled into its new home with Megs, and its ancient spirit has began to weave through the air at the Craggs. Its humming a low, resonant tune, like the wind through canyon rocks back in Navajo lands, places I’d only read about but felt in my bones. But its latest journey was not all smooth sailing. It had traveled the Groot Trek once, enduring dust storms and ox-wagon ruts, only to fall victim to the modern delivery cabinets of Pudo and cardboard boxes. It snapped a leg. Just like me, when I was younger on the Rugby fields of Grey College. One of the most physically painful and traumatic episodes in my life.

That urn had it own purpose. It was its way of creating and developing a bond with Megs. I shipped down some Pratley Putty, that unassuming gray miracle born from South African ingenuity and trusted by astronauts hurtling toward the moon. The leg was restored, equilibrium achieved as the heirloom found another gatherer to continue her cosmic travels.

In Joburg, Eddy my bicycle leans against the wall, his frame silent but expectant. You see, objects like my bicycle and the Samovar now with Megs aren’t just things; they’re companions, vessels for the unseen. The Samovar’s purpose, an e

lusive glimmer of the Holy Grail, unfolding not through force or logic, but through the gentle hands of a woman attuned to its rhythm. Perhaps it was destined to heal more than metal, to be a generational defender of gatherers, to stitch together threads of heritage, from its wanderings around the southern lands of Africa, echoing the Navajo belief that everything holds a spirit, waiting to be honoured. And in that bonding, a new chapter of the Maritz Trek journey etched itself into eternity.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

A letter that has been waiting to be posted for an eternity

In the quiet corners of the digital world, there lived a trail of unspoken words, like whispers carried on the wind across the grasslands. I stumbled upon evidence of their trail one rainy day, these emails you’d sent to an old work address of mine, a place I’d long since abandoned, like a forgotten outpost in the desert. The breadcrumbs to their existence but never being able to access them. Lost. How many moons had passed since I’d left that job? I couldn’t say for sure, but it felt like ages, but there they would have lingered in the ether, unopened, unread, like ships passing in the night, their lanterns flickering unseen.

In my mind, this discovery tilted the world off its axis, shattering the delicate equilibrium we’d all taken for granted. What secrets did those lost dispatches hold? Were they invitations to gatherings I never attended, pulling me into the warmth of family moments I missed? Or perhaps holiday pictures, snapshots of joy and laughter from seasons gone by, colours and smiles I’d never witnessed? The unknown weighed on me, a shadow over the heart, reminding me of the fragility of connections we assume are unbreakable.

Your life, dear one, was no fairy tale of ease. It was marked by trials that seemed unfairly heaped upon you, unkindnesses from the world, shunnings that echoed like distant thunder, and isolations that felt as ancient and unjust as forgotten rituals. Yet through it all, you remained a kind soul, a gentle light in the storm, offering warmth where others might have withheld it. And me? I confess, I wasn’t always the attentive son-in-law you deserved. You weren’t my priority as you should have been, lost amid the rush of my own stories and distractions. I have no excuse for that, and those missing emails now hang heavy on my heart, like skipped beats in a rhythm that could have been fuller, richer. They represent missed opportunities, unspoken reaches across the divide, chances to deepen a relationship that stayed on the surface when it yearned to plunge into deeper waters.

But there’s a thread of magic woven into this tale, one that ties us together in ways I cherish. You see, I carry a bit of Navajo spirit in my bones, from what I believe was a whisper from a previous life, where traditions run deep and clothing isn’t just fabric, but heirlooms passed down, carrying stories and souls across generations. That Christmas gift you gave me, the jersey, oh, it’s my absolute favorite, a treasure I hold close. It’s become my own heirloom, infused with your kindness, wrapping around me like a protective cloak. In that Navajo way, it’s a connection that lives on, close to my heart, a reminder of the bond we shared, even if it was quieter than it might have been.

Now, as the story draws to its close, I send these words out into the universe, hoping they find you in the eternal peace you so richly deserve. Rest well, dear mother-in-law, in the light of forever. I hope, somehow, you read this, feel this, and know that the equilibrium is restored in my heart through gratitude and love.

With all my affection, Your Son-in-Law

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

My cowboy blanket

I’ve always harboured a deep fascination with the Navajo people, a reverence that borders on the spiritual. Growing up in the vast, sun-baked landscapes of South Africa, I found myself drawn to stories of indigenous cultures across the world, but none captivated me quite like the Navajo. It must have been all those cowboy movies and series we saw on our Telefunken. Their resilience in the face of adversity, their profound connection to the land, and their artistry in weaving—particularly their blankets—spoke to something deep within me. These weren’t mere fabrics; they were tapestries of life, woven with prayers, histories, and the threads of survival. I read voraciously about their traditions, how each blanket carried the weaver’s spirit, a protective shield against the harshness of the desert nights. Over time, I assimilated this reverence into my own life, treating certain objects not as possessions, but as companions infused with memory and comfort. And nowhere is this more evident than in my relationship with blankets.

Let me explain through a personal ritual that has become as essential to me as breathing. I own a camping bed of the stretcher variety—simple, sturdy, the kind that elevates you just enough off the ground to feel connected to the earth without its discomforts. It’s not luxurious by any stretch, but sleeping on it brings a peace that’s almost transcendent. Even when I’m home, surrounded by the trappings of modern comfort, I sometimes haul it out from storage, set it up in a quiet corner, and surrender to its embrace. It’s as if the taut canvas whispers secrets of open skies and forgotten adventures.

Central to this ritual is what I affectionately call my “cowboy blanket.” It’s a thick, woolly thing, woven in a bold red plaid pattern that evokes the rugged frontiers of old Western tales—though, in truth, it’s more akin to the enduring warmth of a wood fire. This blanket is identical to the one I cherished as a young boy on Oakvilla farm, where the days stretched long and the nights were alive with the symphony of and the waves of the veld. Back then, I’d burrow under its weight, feeling utterly secure. Outside my window stood a sentinel of nature: a massive Wild Fig tree, its branches sprawling like ancient arms. Perched in its canopy was a Hamerkop’s nest, an enormous, haphazard fortress built twig by twig with unyielding determination. I’d lie there, staring out at that bird’s relentless labor, admiring its grit—the way it defied storms and predators to create a home. In that bed, under that blanket, in that old farmhouse, I have no memory of anything but pleasant, comforting sleep. No nightmares intruded; no restlessness stirred. It was a sanctuary woven from wool and wonder.

Recently, though, I loaned out one of my two beds along with that beloved cowboy blanket to a friend in need. A kind gesture, I thought, but one that left a void I hadn’t anticipated. Try as I might, no substitute blanket could recapture that elusive peace. I’ve cycled through softer ones, lighter ones, even those with modern synthetic fills promising ergonomic bliss, but nothing works. The nights feel incomplete, the sleep shallow and fleeting. It’s the missing blanket that’s to blame, that red plaid guardian of my repose. So today, I’m setting out on a quest to find a duplicate, scouring markets and shops for something that matches not just the pattern, but the soul it embodies. Perhaps I’ll stumble upon one that feels just right, heavy with promise.

In weaving this tale of my blanket and my stretcher bed, I see the threads intertwining with the Navajo’s profound reverence for their own woven masterpieces. Just as their blankets are more than coverings—they are heirlooms passed down through generations, imbued with stories of endurance, protection, and cultural identity, my cowboy blanket has become a vessel for my own history. It carries the echoes of Oakvilla farm, the watchful Hamerkop, and the boy who found solace under its folds. The Navajo teach us that such items are sacred, not for their material worth, but for the comfort and continuity they provide in an unpredictable world. In adopting this mindset, I’ve transformed a simple woolen throw into a talisman, much like their rugs that ward off the chill of both body and spirit. It’s a quiet assimilation, a bridge across cultures, reminding me that true reverence lies in the stories we wrap around ourselves.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Chapter 1: The Congratulations That Took Me Too Long

It was almost midnight when I saw the announcement. Someone I know had received an opportunity I had quietly hoped might come my way. I read the kind messages beneath it, watched the little hearts gather, and felt something I did not want to admit. I was glad for this person, but I was also disappointed for myself. I set my phone facedown on the bed, as though hiding the screen might hide the comparison that had already started in my mind.

I thought of a line associated with Jimmy Stewart, spoken by the character portraying him in a film about his life. He says he does not want fame to make him like a god; he wants to see a good man when he looks in the mirror. I explore that thought in Jimmy Stewart’s reflection on fame and being a good man, but what unsettles me is how easily I can want to be seen as good without wanting to face everything happening inside me. Nobody else knew I felt jealous. I could have typed a lovely congratulations and still carried bitterness into tomorrow.

That is why learning to follow Jesus when comparison steals your peace is not only about finding confidence. It is about letting God speak to parts of us we normally keep private. It is possible to behave politely while secretly resenting another person's happiness. I know because I have caught myself doing exactly that. The uncomfortable question is not whether I can appear gracious. It is whether I am willing to become gracious when there is no audience to reward me.

After His resurrection, Jesus spoke with Peter about the life ahead of him. Peter noticed another disciple and asked, in effect, what would happen to that man. Jesus answered with a question of His own: “What is that to thee? follow thou me” (John 21:22, KJV). I do not hear those words as Jesus scolding a person for being curious. I hear a loving invitation to stop measuring my calling against someone else's. Peter had his own work to do. So do I.

The next morning, I could have made another cup of coffee and searched for reasons that person's success was less impressive than it looked. That would have been an easy way to protect my pride. Instead, I could pray honestly: Lord, I am disappointed. I wanted that door to open for me. Please help me be glad that it opened for someone else. Then I could write the congratulations I had been avoiding and mean it, even if my feelings needed a little time to catch up.

I am learning that goodness is not always a warm feeling that arrives before we act. Sometimes it begins when we notice a small, ungenerous thought and refuse to build a home for it. We bring it to Jesus without pretending, and we ask Him to enlarge our hearts. The person on the other side of the screen never needs to know how long that prayer took. What matters is that I did not let a private disappointment decide what kind of friend I would be.

Chapter 2: The Words I Wish I Had Interrupted

The kitchen is crowded, and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Someone makes a joke about a person who is not there. A few people laugh, and the conversation continues. Nothing about the moment appears especially serious. Yet something inside me becomes uncomfortable. I know the person being discussed, and I know they have been going through a difficult time. I also know that speaking up might make everyone look at me as though I have forgotten how to enjoy a harmless conversation.

I think many of us have experienced that quiet conflict. We recognize something unkind, but we hesitate because we want to belong. We tell ourselves that remaining silent is not the same as agreeing. Sometimes that is true. Other times, our silence becomes a way of protecting our comfort while somebody else's dignity is being diminished.

What bothers me about these moments is how ordinary they are. I might spend the morning thinking about the importance of treating people with compassion, then spend the evening struggling to practice it. I can understand the teachings of Jesus and still become surprisingly timid when following them might make a conversation uncomfortable.

In John chapter 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman beside a well. The encounter crosses social and religious boundaries that mattered deeply in His time. Jesus knows uncomfortable truths about her life, yet He does not treat her as someone unworthy of conversation. He speaks with her about living water and reveals something extraordinary about Himself. Where others might have seen reasons to keep their distance, Jesus saw a person worth reaching.

I return to that encounter when I am tempted to reduce someone to a story I have heard about them. People are always more complicated than the worst thing someone knows about their lives. The neighbor who appears unfriendly may be caring for a sick spouse. The coworker who seems distracted may be struggling to keep a family together. I do not need to invent explanations for their behavior, but I can remember that I rarely know everything another person is carrying.

If the conversation in that kitchen turned unkind, I could say something simple. Perhaps I could remind everyone that the person being discussed has had a difficult year. I would not need to embarrass the speaker or deliver a lecture. A little courage, offered gently, might be enough to change the direction of the conversation.

I am beginning to understand that following Jesus requires me to care less about appearing agreeable and more about being loving. Those are not always the same thing. Sometimes goodness asks us to risk a little awkwardness so another person does not have to stand alone.

Later, when the kitchen is empty and the conversation is over, I want to remember that I treated an absent person with the same respect I would have offered if they had been standing beside me.

Chapter 3: The Honest Answer I Almost Didn't Give

The church parking lot was almost empty when a friend caught up with me beside my car. He asked how I was doing, and I already knew the answer I usually gave. I could smile, mention how busy the week had been, and ask about his family. It would be pleasant, and neither of us would have to linger. But I had spent much of that week feeling discouraged, and for some reason I was tired of pretending that being dependable meant never admitting it.

I told him I was having a hard time. I did not give him a dramatic story or ask him to solve anything. I simply said that some things I had hoped for were not working out, and I had begun questioning myself more than I wanted to. He listened without hurrying me. Then he asked whether we could pray together before we left. I had come outside expecting to offer someone an encouraging word, not to be the person receiving one.

For years, I have been tempted to think that goodness is something I should be able to display without showing any weakness. I want to be patient, useful, and steady. Those are worthwhile hopes, but I can turn them into another performance if I am not careful. Even the wish to see a good man in the mirror can become a demand that I never let anybody witness my unfinished places.

Jesus gives me another way to live. In Matthew 11:28, He invites those who labor and carry heavy burdens to come to Him for rest. He does not tell them to make themselves admirable first. He knows what they are carrying. He offers rest before they have learned to carry everything gracefully.

I think that invitation changes the way I understand character. I still need to choose kindness when I feel overlooked, and I still need to defend the dignity of someone who is absent. But I also need enough honesty to say when I am struggling. Otherwise, I may spend my whole life protecting the appearance of strength while refusing the love that could actually strengthen me.

My friend and I prayed beside the car, with the evening air growing colder around us. Nothing about my circumstances changed in those few minutes. The things that disappointed me were still there. But I drove home less alone, and I understood something I had missed before.

I do not need to look into the mirror tomorrow and find a man who has finally made himself good. I want to find a man who is still willing to be taught by Jesus, still willing to tell the truth, and still willing to love without needing to be admired for it.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

I just finished watching 'The End of Oak Street'. It's a very simple movie, but parts of it made me smile. My favorite part is the color scheme with its dreamy blur. It captured the feeling of the early 80s properly. I would have been ten. I was always, and still am, enamored by the variety of green that exists in nature. My second favorite part is the feathers on the dinosaurs. And my third favorite part is the Sagan quote. The movie only shares part of it. I will share the entire quote as follows:

“What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” —Carl Sagan

If that quote is kept in mind while watching the movie, it really shifts the tragedy. Doesn't it?

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

The error codes were lying, and the machine was very sure of itself.

In the 1980s, a Xerox field service technician was called out to a photocopier. It produced, in the words of the researchers who later wrote the episode up, “copious raw information in the form of error codes” and “obligingly crashed when tested”. The trouble was that the error codes and the crashes did not tally. The company's training and its directive documentation tied each error to a code and each code to a fix, so once the codes stopped telling the truth, the official procedure had nothing left to offer except replacing the machine. The technician called in a specialist. The specialist was baffled too.

What happened next was recorded by Julian Orr, an anthropologist then working with Xerox PARC, and later retold by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in a 1991 paper that became one of the founding texts of organisational learning. The two men did not consult a manual. They told stories. Through the morning, over lunch, and back in front of the machine all afternoon, they swapped memories of other copiers with overlapping symptoms, testing each story against the machine's behaviour. Orr's account describes “a five hour effort” that “yielded a dozen anecdotes”. The diagnosis finally came out of what Orr called an “antiphonal recitation”, in which the two men told different versions of the same encounter until the versions converged on the fault.

Keep that scene in mind, because it is the most precise description available of the thing Pearson says the skilled trades are about to lose. It is not information. The machine had plenty of information. It is the judgement to know when the information is wrong, and that judgement lived in two people talking to each other beside a broken machine.

On 24 September 2026, at the WorldSkills International Conference in Shanghai, Pearson launched research warning that a “triple capability gap” is opening across the skilled trade, technical and service occupations that keep hospitals, factories and infrastructure running. AI is reshaping those jobs faster than education and training systems can adapt, the report argues, just as experienced workers retire and take decades of practical knowledge with them. The result is a generation of early-career workers at risk of becoming, in Pearson's phrase, “AI-rich but experience-poor”.

Which raises two uncomfortable questions. What happens to a trade when the apprentice turns up holding an AI assistant, but the mentor who was supposed to teach the difference between right and almost-right has already gone? And can the knowledge that lives in a plumber's hands and a technician's instincts be written into training systems at all, or does some of it only ever travel from one person to another?

What Pearson Actually Found in Shanghai

The report is titled For Every Future: Preparing Early-Career Skilled Trade, Technical and Service Talent for an AI-Infused World. It combines labour market and AI exposure analysis across the United States, the United Kingdom and China with surveys, interviews and roundtables involving employers, educators, industry bodies, workforce experts, students and early-career workers. It also looks closely at two occupations: pharmacy technicians and industrial machinery mechanics.

The core argument is that these workers now need three things at once. The first is role-specific AI literacy and the critical judgement to use AI safely. The second is a set of human capabilities, including communication, collaboration, adaptability, emotional intelligence and learning agility. The third, and the one this article is about, is the practical and institutional knowledge traditionally developed through experience and handed down by experienced colleagues. Pearson's framing is that AI is more often changing day-to-day tasks than eliminating roles altogether, which makes the gap harder to see: nobody gets a redundancy letter, but the job underneath them quietly changes shape.

Some of the numbers are stark. Across the UK occupations covered by the research, 99 per cent of openings are expected to come from replacement demand, meaning workers who retire, change careers or leave the labour market, rather than from new jobs. The US figure is 98.5 per cent. Fewer than half of the industrial machinery mechanics surveyed felt their training was preparing them for AI-enabled work. One UK pharmacy industry participant told the researchers that it takes two to three years to revise pharmacy technician education and training standards, which is a long time in a field where the tools can change within a single product cycle. And the stakes are not abstract. Among pharmacy technicians, 98 per cent rated exactness and accuracy as extremely important, and 44 per cent rated the consequences of error as extremely serious.

Sharon Hague, Pearson's President of English Language Learning and its UK chief executive, put the problem plainly at the launch. “The challenge is that demand for these workers is rising just as many experts are retiring and taking decades of practical knowledge with them,” she said. “If we don't rethink how expertise is developed, the gap between what employers need and what workers can do will continue to grow.”

It is worth being clear about what kind of document this is. Pearson is an education and assessment company, and a report concluding that training systems need rethinking is also, inevitably, a report about a market Pearson sells into. That does not make its findings wrong, and its replacement-demand figures sit comfortably alongside independent labour data. But its most interesting claim is not a statistic. It is the idea buried in the third capability: that there is a category of knowledge that cannot simply be bought, downloaded or prompted into existence, and that its main carriers are leaving.

The Arithmetic of Replacement

Start with the people who carry that knowledge, and the rate at which they are leaving.

In construction, the Construction Industry Training Board's Construction Workforce Outlook for 2026 to 2030, published on 17 June 2026, estimates that the industry will need an average of 41,200 extra workers a year, roughly 206,000 over five years. CITB's diagnosis is blunt: too few people are entering the sector, too many experienced workers are leaving, and productivity improvements have not been enough to close the gap. In US manufacturing, Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute projected in 2024 that as many as 3.8 million additional employees could be needed between 2024 and 2033, and that as many as 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled if the skills and applicant gaps are not addressed.

Plumbing makes the pattern concrete. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 510,600 plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters, projects around 42,000 openings a year over the coming decade, and notes that many of those openings will come from the need to replace workers who move to other occupations or leave the labour force, for example to retire. The same entry explains how the trade is learnt: most plumbers learn on the job through an apprenticeship lasting four to five years, with 2,000 hours of paid on-the-job training each year alongside technical instruction. In England, the Level 3 Plumbing and Domestic Heating Technician apprenticeship standard has a typical duration of 48 months.

Those durations are the real point. Four years is not how long it takes to learn the facts of plumbing, which would fit in a decent textbook. Four years is how long it takes to be around enough jobs, enough awkward pipework, enough customers and enough mistakes, in the company of someone who already knows, for the facts to turn into judgement.

And the pipeline feeding that process has been narrowing. Department for Education figures published on 27 November 2025 recorded 353,500 apprenticeship starts in England in the 2024/25 academic year, up from 340,000 the year before. But in 2016/17, the year the apprenticeship levy was introduced, there were 494,900. The mix has shifted too. Higher-level apprenticeships now make up around 40 per cent of starts, while intermediate apprenticeships, the traditional entry route for young people into a trade, have fallen from 43 per cent of starts in 2017/18 to 19 per cent. The system is producing more graduate-style apprenticeships and fewer people at the bottom of the ladder, which is precisely where the long, slow, person-to-person transfer of craft knowledge has always happened.

Put the two trends together and you get Pearson's scenario in its simplest form. The mentors are leaving faster than they can be replaced, and the replacements are arriving through a narrower door, into jobs whose tools are changing underneath them.

Knowing More Than We Can Tell

To understand why the loss of mentors matters more than the loss of workers, you have to go back to a Hungarian-British chemist turned philosopher.

In The Tacit Dimension, published in 1966, Michael Polanyi compressed a lifetime of thinking about scientific practice into a single sentence: “we can know more than we can tell.” We recognise a face among thousands without being able to say how. Polanyi's claim was stronger than the observation that some knowledge is hard to describe. He argued that all knowledge rests on a tacit foundation, a set of skills, habits and perceptions that we rely on without attending to them.

The idea might have stayed in philosophy if a young sociologist had not put it to the test. In the early 1970s, Harry Collins, now a distinguished research professor at Cardiff University, studied laboratories trying to build a then-new device called the TEA laser. His finding, published in 1974 and followed up in 1975 with his co-author R. G. Harrison, was striking. No scientist he studied succeeded in building a working laser using only published papers or other written sources. Every group that managed it had obtained some crucial part of the knowledge through personal contact: phone calls, visits, someone who had built one standing in the room. The written account was complete in every respect except the one that mattered.

Collins spent decades refining what that means, and his 2010 book Tacit and Explicit Knowledge offers the most useful map we have for Pearson's question. He splits tacit knowledge into three kinds.

The first is relational tacit knowledge. This is knowledge that could in principle be written down but in practice is not, because nobody has bothered, because it seems too obvious, or because someone would rather keep it to themselves. The torque setting a senior fitter uses on a particular flange, which differs from the manual for good reasons nobody recorded, is relational. So is the knowledge that a particular customer's boiler has a history.

The second is somatic tacit knowledge, which lives in the body. Balancing a bicycle is Collins's classic example. For the trades, think of the feel of a pipe cutter biting cleanly, the sound of a pump running slightly wrong, the resistance of a fitting that is about to strip. This is knowledge whose limits come from the nature of bodies and brains, not from social choice.

The third, and for Collins the deepest, is collective tacit knowledge. This is knowledge that belongs to a community rather than to any individual: the sense of what counts as a proper job, which rules can be bent on site and which cannot, when a shortcut becomes a hazard. You acquire it by being socialised into the group that holds it, and for Collins it is the hardest kind of tacit knowledge to make explicit, because it lives in the group rather than in any one head.

That three-way split turns out to answer most of the question in the headline, but before getting there it is worth seeing what happens when a society forgets that the split exists.

When the Recipe Loses Its Impurity

In the 2000s, the US National Nuclear Security Administration set out to refurbish the W76 warhead carried on Trident submarine-launched missiles. One component needed a classified material code-named Fogbank. The facility that had produced it had long since closed. According to a 2009 article in Los Alamos National Laboratory's Nuclear Weapons Journal, most of the personnel involved in the original production process were no longer available, and the agency had to reconstruct the process from historical records.

The reconstruction did not work. According to the Los Alamos account, as reported by the defence publication The War Zone, the new process made a purer material than the old one, and the purity was the problem. The original batches had contained an impurity that the weapon's performance had quietly come to depend on. Nobody had documented it because nobody had known it mattered, and the people who might have noticed the difference were no longer there.

The Government Accountability Office report GAO-09-385, released on 2 March 2009, documented the cost. The planned first refurbished W76 slipped from September 2007 to September 2008, and NNSA spent $69 million addressing Fogbank production problems.

Fogbank is an extreme case, but it shows plainly what Pearson is warning about. The written record was, as far as anyone knew, complete. What was missing was not a fact but a relationship between facts, the kind of thing an experienced operator notices because something looks or feels different from last time. In Collins's terms, it was relational knowledge that had never been told, and the only people who could have told it were gone.

The Assistant That Talks Like a Journeyman

Now introduce the AI assistant.

The tools arriving on shop floors and in vans are not speculative. In May 2025, Siemens announced that its Maintenance Copilot Senseye would give maintenance teams “expert-level equipment diagnostics” without their needing specialist technical knowledge, citing pilot implementations with an average 25 per cent reduction in reactive maintenance time. In September 2025, ServiceTitan, whose software is widely used by US plumbing, heating and electrical contractors, launched Atlas, an AI assistant that gives technicians in the field instant answers through its mobile app. Its co-founder and president, Vahe Kuzoyan, described it as “a trusted co-pilot or even a chief of staff that adapts to the specific workflows” of each business.

There is real evidence that such tools help people who are new to a job. The best-known study, by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025, tracked 5,179 customer support agents as a generative AI assistant was rolled out. Productivity rose by 14 per cent on average and by 34 per cent for novice and low-skilled workers, with minimal effect on the most experienced. The authors offer suggestive evidence that the tool worked by spreading the best practices of more able workers and helping newer ones move down the experience curve. In other words, some relational tacit knowledge, the kind that top performers had but had never written down, had been captured in the data and handed on.

That is a genuine counterweight to the gloomier reading of Pearson's report. But notice what it measured: speed and resolution in conversations, in a domain made of language. The question for the trades is what happens outside that domain, where the work is physical, the stakes are safety-critical, and the machine can be confidently wrong.

Collins has a concept that fits the new assistants almost too neatly. In Rethinking Expertise, written with Robert Evans and published in 2007, he distinguishes contributory expertise, the ability to actually do the work, from interactional expertise, the ability to speak the language of a practice fluently without being able to practise it. Specialist journalists and good peer reviewers have interactional expertise. They can talk the talk. In a 2024 paper in AI and Society, Collins argued that large language models learn from the internet rather than being socialised into communities, and that the result is systems that answer with fabrications as fluently as with facts.

An AI assistant is, in this sense, the most complete interactional expert ever built. It speaks the language of every trade. It can explain a pressure test, describe a failed seal, list the causes of a tripping breaker. What it lacks is the thing that made the Xerox specialist valuable: a body of experience against which to notice that the story it is telling does not fit the machine in front of it. Hand that fluency to an apprentice who has no such experience either, and you get Pearson's phrase exactly. AI-rich. Experience-poor.

Right Versus Almost Right

The danger is not that the machine is usually wrong. It is that it is usually right, and people learn to stop checking.

Researchers have been measuring this for decades. In a 2010 review in Human Factors, Raja Parasuraman and Dietrich Manzey described automation bias as the tendency to over-rely on automated aids, producing errors of omission, where people miss problems the system fails to flag, and errors of commission, where they follow advice that is wrong. Two findings from that review should worry anyone designing AI-assisted apprenticeships. Automation bias occurs in experts as well as novices. And it cannot be prevented simply by training or instructions.

Recent studies show what happens when AI enters that picture. In the field experiment with 758 Boston Consulting Group consultants reported by Fabrizio Dell'Acqua and colleagues at Harvard Business School, Wharton, MIT Sloan and Warwick, AI help made people substantially faster and better on tasks within the model's capabilities. But on a task deliberately chosen to fall outside what the AI could do well, consultants using AI were 19 percentage points less likely to reach the correct answer than those working without it. The researchers' metaphor for this is a jagged frontier: the boundary of what the AI can do well is irregular and hard to see, which makes it easy to cross without noticing.

Then there is the question of what reliance does to the learner. In January 2026, Anthropic published a randomised controlled trial of 52 mostly junior software developers learning an unfamiliar Python library. Those who used AI assistance scored 50 per cent on a follow-up quiz, against 67 per cent for those who coded by hand. The largest gap was on debugging questions, which is to say on the ability to recognise when code is wrong and why. Code is not copper pipe, but the skill that suffered is exactly the one the Pearson report is worried about: knowing when the output in front of you is almost right, and therefore wrong.

The most sobering evidence comes from medicine, where the consequences are measured in missed cancers. A multicentre observational study led by Krzysztof Budzyń and published in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology in August 2025 looked at 19 experienced endoscopists, each with more than 2,000 colonoscopies behind them. After AI-assisted detection was introduced, their adenoma detection rate in procedures performed without the AI fell from 28.4 per cent to 22.4 per cent. These were not novices. They were experts whose unaided performance appeared to decline after routine exposure to the machine. If skilled professionals can lose ground that quickly, the question for a trainee who never builds that ground in the first place answers itself.

Lisanne Bainbridge saw all of this coming in a short paper published in Automatica in 1983. “Ironies of Automation” observed that efficient retrieval of knowledge from long-term memory depends on frequency of use, and that some knowledge “develops only through use and feedback about its effectiveness”. Then she wrote the sentence that reads like a summary of the Pearson report forty-three years early: “There is some concern that the present generation of automated systems, which are monitored by former manual operators, are riding on their skills, which later generations of operators cannot be expected to have.”

That is the mechanism. Today's AI-assisted workplaces look safe partly because the people supervising them learnt their trade before the assistant arrived. They can tell when the answer is off because they once had to work it out themselves. Remove them, and the safety margin goes with them, without anyone noticing, until the error codes stop matching the crashes.

How Apprenticeship Actually Transmits Judgement

If the mentor's value is not information, what exactly is being transferred when an apprentice works alongside one?

In 1991, the anthropologist Jean Lave and the educational theorist Etienne Wenger published Situated Learning, built partly on studies of Vai and Gola tailors in Liberia. They found that the apprentices were not formally taught tailoring in any conventional sense. They learnt through what Lave and Wenger called legitimate peripheral participation: doing real but low-risk parts of real work at the edge of a community of practitioners, gradually moving towards the centre as their competence grew. The learning was inseparable from belonging. You did not learn tailoring and then join the tailors. You became a tailor by being among them.

Richard Sennett, the sociologist, made a related case in The Craftsman, published in 2008. He describes craft as “a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding.” Problem finding is the key phrase. A manual or an assistant can solve a problem you have already identified. Knowing that there is a problem, that the joint looks fine but is not, that the reading is plausible but wrong, is the skill that comes from the rhythm Sennett describes, and it takes time. “By one commonly used measure,” he notes, “about ten thousand hours of experience are required to produce a master carpenter or musician.”

Sennett also noticed what happens when a tool takes over the part of the work where that rhythm develops. Writing about computer-aided design, he recalls the physicist Victor Weisskopf telling MIT students who presented him with computer-generated results: “When you show me that result, the computer understands the answer, but I don't think you understand the answer.” His conclusion is blunt: “when the head and the hand are separate, it is the head that suffers.”

The most careful modern study of this problem comes from Matt Beane, who researches technology and work in the Technology Management department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and whose 2024 book The Skill Code draws on years of fieldwork in robotic surgery. In traditional open surgery, residents learnt by doing progressively more of each operation with a senior surgeon's hands beside theirs. The surgical robot changed that. “My research shows that the lead surgeon controls the robot, and the trainee has become completely optional,” Beane said when the book was published. The few residents who became genuinely skilled did so through what he calls shadow learning, bending the rules to get practice, including spending hundreds of hours watching recorded procedures. Beane frames the conditions for building skill as challenge, complexity and connection, and it is the third, the bond of trust between novice and expert, that intelligent machines most easily sever.

The pattern in Beane's operating theatres is the pattern Pearson is warning about in plant rooms and pharmacies. The technology does not attack the apprentice directly. It makes the apprentice unnecessary to the expert's work, and in doing so quietly removes the apprenticeship.

What Can Be Written Down and What Cannot

So, back to the second question. Can a plumber's hands and a technician's instincts be written into training systems?

The honest answer is some of it, more than sceptics assume, and less than vendors claim. Collins's three categories show where the lines fall.

Relational tacit knowledge can be captured, and there is a famous proof. In his 1991 Harvard Business Review article “The Knowledge-Creating Company”, Ikujiro Nonaka described how Matsushita's engineers struggled to design a home bread-making machine that kneaded dough properly. A software developer, Ikuko Tanaka, proposed a solution: she trained with the head baker at the Osaka International Hotel, whose bread was reputed to be the best in the city, to study his kneading. She noticed that he had a distinctive way of stretching the dough. After a year of trial and error with the project's engineers, she produced specifications, including special ribs inside the machine, that reproduced the baker's technique. The resulting “twist dough” method gave Matsushita a product that set a record for first-year sales of a new kitchen appliance.

It is often told as proof that tacit knowledge can be made explicit. Look closely, though, at how it was done. The knowledge was not extracted by interview or questionnaire. Tanaka had to apprentice herself to the baker, learning by observation, imitation and practice, as Nonaka put it, before she could translate anything. The conversion ran through a person. And it took a year.

That suggests a practical route for the trades. Much of what a retiring engineer knows is relational: the history of a particular plant, the quirks of a particular model, the workarounds that never made it into the manual. That knowledge can be captured, and AI can help, by transcribing, indexing and retrieving it. The Brynjolfsson study suggests AI can even spread the habits of top performers to newcomers. But capture has a deadline. It has to happen while the experts are still at work, alongside the people who will inherit the job, because the Tanaka story suggests the most valuable capture happens through apprenticeship rather than interview. Fogbank shows what happens when nobody does it.

Somatic tacit knowledge is harder. Simulation, haptic training rigs, augmented reality overlays and video can all accelerate it, and Beane's finding that some surgical trainees built real skill through intensive video review shows that recorded expertise has value. But a body still has to do the thing, repeatedly, with feedback. No amount of fluent explanation from an assistant will teach an apprentice how a compression fitting feels when it is right. At best, the machine can tell them what to practise.

Collective tacit knowledge is the category where the answer is closest to no. The sense of what counts as a proper job, when to stop and ask, which risks the trade tolerates and which it never does: this is the property of a community, and it passes by socialisation. Orr's copier technicians illustrate it. Their diagnosis came from a shared stock of stories that belonged to the group rather than to either man, and it was the group's norms, including the loss of face that came with simply swapping out the machine, that pushed them to keep going. Brown and Duguid made the point that the training and documentation were about maintaining machines, while much of the real work was about maintaining the social setting. An AI can summarise the stories. It cannot make an apprentice a member of the community that tells them.

Designing for the Mentor's Absence

None of this means the AI-equipped apprentice is doomed. It means the assistant has to be designed and deployed as part of an apprenticeship, not as a replacement for one.

The evidence points to some fairly concrete principles. The first concerns how the tool is used. In Anthropic's trial, the developers who retained the most were the ones who used AI to build understanding, and the highest-scoring group asked only conceptual questions and then relied on their own improved understanding to do the work. At the WorldSkills conference in Shanghai, Pearson's chief technology officer, David Treat, made the same point from the other side: “If you are using AI as an answer engine, you're not engaging the brain in the struggle that learning requires.” An assistant that makes the apprentice explain why a reading looks wrong before offering its own view is a different educational instrument from one that simply supplies the fix.

The second concerns mentors. Pearson's own recommendations call for expanding opportunities to develop practical know-how through mentoring, observation, feedback, simulation and hands-on experience. That sounds obvious, but it runs against the economic logic of the tools themselves, which are sold on making experts more productive and novices less dependent on them. If an assistant frees up a senior engineer's time, some of that time has to be deliberately spent with the apprentice, or Beane's operating-theatre pattern repeats itself on the factory floor. Bainbridge's final irony applies directly: “it is the most successful automated systems, with rare need for manual intervention, which may need the greatest investment in human operator training.”

The third is the unglamorous one. Apprentices need structured practice without the machine, which is what the endoscopy study implies clinicians now need too. The point is not nostalgia for doing things the hard way. It is that the ability to notice when the assistant is wrong is built by doing the work without it, and cannot be built any other way.

Go back, one last time, to Orr's copier. The machine gave its technicians more information than they could use, and none of it added up. What saved the job was not better data. It was two people with long memories, a shared language of experience, and a professional pride that would not let them give up. Today's AI assistants are, in a sense, error codes that can talk: fluent, confident, usually right, occasionally and invisibly wrong. The apprentice holding one needs what the Xerox technician had, someone who has seen this before.

The uncomfortable arithmetic of the Pearson report is that for many apprentices, that someone is already retiring. Some of what they know can be written into training systems, and the effort should begin now. The rest will travel the way it always has, from one person to another, beside a broken machine, or it will not travel at all.

References and Sources

1. Pearson. “Pearson research warns of a 'triple capability gap' emerging as AI adoption outpaces education and training in skilled occupations.” Press release, PR Newswire, Shanghai, 24 September 2026, launching For Every Future: Preparing Early-Career Skilled Trade, Technical and Service Talent for an AI-Infused World; also reported by FE News, StockTitan, People Matters and ChannelLife, 24 to 25 September 2026. Accessed 25 September 2026.
2. Pearson plc. “Pearson Appoints Experienced Company Executive Sharon Hague as President of English Language Learning.” Press release, 28 February 2025.
3. WorldSkills Conference 2026. “WorldSkills Shanghai 2026 outlines a human-first approach to AI.” Conference news, National Exhibition and Convention Center, Shanghai, September 2026. Accessed 25 September 2026.
4. Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Doubleday, 1966; reissued University of Chicago Press, 2009.
5. Collins, H. M. “The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks.” Science Studies, volume 4, 1974, pages 165 to 186; and Collins, H. M. and Harrison, R. G. “Building a TEA Laser: The Caprices of Communication.” Social Studies of Science, volume 5, number 4, 1975.
6. Collins, Harry. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. University of Chicago Press, 2010.
7. Collins, Harry and Evans, Robert. Rethinking Expertise. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
8. Collins, Harry. “Why artificial intelligence needs sociology of knowledge: parts I and II.” AI and Society, volume 40, 2025 (published online 18 May 2024), pages 1249 to 1263. DOI: 10.1007/s00146-024-01954-8.
9. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. Yale University Press and Allen Lane, 2008; extract published as “The Troubled Craftsman”, Arquitectura Viva.
10. Nonaka, Ikujiro. “The Knowledge-Creating Company.” Harvard Business Review, November to December 1991; reprinted July to August 2007.
11. Lave, Jean and Wenger, Etienne. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
12. Orr, Julian E. Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Cornell University Press, 1996.
13. Brown, John Seely and Duguid, Paul. “Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation.” Organization Science, volume 2, number 1, 1991, pages 40 to 57.
14. Bainbridge, Lisanne. “Ironies of Automation.” Automatica, volume 19, number 6, 1983, pages 775 to 779.
15. Parasuraman, Raja and Manzey, Dietrich H. “Complacency and Bias in Human Use of Automation: An Attentional Integration.” Human Factors, volume 52, number 3, 2010. DOI: 10.1177/0018720810376055.
16. Budzyń, Krzysztof et al. “Endoscopist deskilling risk after exposure to artificial intelligence in colonoscopy: a multicentre, observational study.” The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, August 2025. PubMed ID 40816301.
17. Anthropic. “How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills.” Anthropic Research, 29 January 2026.
18. Brynjolfsson, Erik, Li, Danielle and Raymond, Lindsey. “Generative AI at Work.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, volume 140, number 2, 2025, pages 889 to 942.
19. Dell'Acqua, Fabrizio, McFowland III, Edward, Mollick, Ethan, Lifshitz-Assaf, Hila, Kellogg, Katherine C., Rajendran, Saran, Krayer, Lisa, Candelon, François and Lakhani, Karim R. “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality.” Harvard Business School Working Paper 24-013, September 2023.
20. Beane, Matt. The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines. Harper Business, 11 June 2024; and University of California, Santa Barbara, “How to build and protect skills in our modern workplace, a world filled with AI and robots”, The Current, 2024.
21. US Government Accountability Office. “Nuclear Weapons: NNSA and DOD Need to More Effectively Manage the Stockpile Life Extension Program.” GAO-09-385, 2 March 2009; and The War Zone, “Fogbank Is Mysterious Material Used In Nukes That's So Secret Nobody Can Say What It Is”, citing Los Alamos National Laboratory's Nuclear Weapons Journal, 2009.
22. Siemens AG. “Siemens introduces AI agents for industrial automation.” Press release, May 2025; and Contractor Magazine, “ServiceTitan Brings AI Automation to the Trades With Atlas”, 19 September 2025.
23. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters.” Occupational Outlook Handbook, accessed 25 September 2026; and Skills England, “Plumbing and domestic heating technician” apprenticeship standard ST0303, Level 3.
24. Department for Education. “Apprenticeships, Academic year 2024/25.” Explore Education Statistics, 27 November 2025; and House of Commons Library, “Apprenticeship starts: has there been a big fall?”
25. Construction Industry Training Board. “CITB publishes Construction Workforce Outlook 2026-2030.” 17 June 2026, with figures reported by Construction News and Building; and Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, “US Manufacturing Could Need as Many as 3.8 Million New Employees by 2033”, April 2024.

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

Support What We Do

Inbetweeners 42- Xalatra Questline Part 3- The Substructure Warrens and Cult of Vecna

The lift in the Gutworks took the players to a lower part of Sigil called the Reconfiguring Channel. This is literally where entire sections of the city are broken down or fabricated. Other than Dabus, no sentient beings inhabit this layer as it is extraordinarily dangerous. Sections of building, road, etc fly at high speeds like a vortex of city sections. Failing a Dex Save of 15 leads to massive bludgeoning damage. The players had to dodge pieces to head to essentially a manhole/service ladder even deeper into Sigil. Xalatra left some unstable glyphs behind on the manhole cover that caused a mini volcanic eruption if triggered. The players activated it from a safe distance before proceeding down to the Substructure Warrens.

The Substructure Warrens are inspired by decommissioned or abandon subways and tunnels beneath cities like New York or Paris. It is a series of passages, tunnels and rooms that were formally like the Gutworks but no longer serve a functional purpose to Sigil. These layers are essentially relics, vestigial organs of Sigil left behind as the city continued to grow and evolve. For a long time, no living creature inhabited these layers. However, after the Faction War, which saw Vecna try to seize control of Sigil, his surviving followers in the city had to flee. In my version of events in the faction war, Vecna never really posed any sort of threat to the Lady of Pain, as her power eclipsed his by many orders of magnitude. More she was irritated by the impertinence of his actions, and the sheer delusional egotism that he thought he could actually challenge her control of the city. Of course, had he succeeded, Vecna would have catapulted himself to a power level beyond any other deity save Primus or the Overgods. He was convinced he could exploit loopholes in how Sigil worked and sieze the Lady of Pain's power from her. This would be like a hummingbird thinking it could outsmart a tornado, and it went about as well as that scenario would for the hummingbird.

Once Vecna was imprisoned, his followers/worship was strictly outlawed across Sigil. Any of his surviving followers were rounded up and placed in endless labyrinths and four dimensional prisons from which they would never leave. To the Lady, death was not an appropriate response for what Vecna had done. Death has little meaning in this multiverse, and his being a cult of death and undeath, would mean even less. But trapping an entity in a fractal fracture between realities where it will be slowly unmade over millennia is far mroe suitable. Many of Vecna's followers abandon worshipping after his fall. Others managed to escape Sigil. But some decided to embed themselves deep underneath Sigil as they bided their time until they found a way to free their vaunted master. The Gutworks wouldn't be low enough, they were still frequently patrolled by the Dabus. However, these substructure warrens are so low, so forgotten, that not even the Lady would notice their presence. The substructure warrens' proximity to the maw only helped in this regard.

So as soon as the players went down into this level, they were discovered by a patrol from Vecna's followers. The patrol consisted of 2 Elite Doom Guards Lords and 4 Deathlock Masterminds. That is two CR 12s and 4 CR 8s. At the Inbetweener's current level, they could potentially defeat such a group but at grave loss of resources and hit points. That's a combined total of 844 hitpoints worth of enemies and A LOT of necrotic damage. And even if the players were successful, this was simply a patrol. They were never meant to fight there way through this level... it was more about diplomacy, stealth or creativity. Vecna may have been a chump compared to the Lady of Pain, but he was still a deity, and these are his most loyal and powerful remaining followers.

The players were brought to the “court” where they were essentially interrogated by the “judge” (a lich). In attendance at the court where a number wights, wraiths, cultists, vampires and a spirit naga. My plan was if the players died, they would be resurrected by the lich but under an intense form of Gaes to free Vecna. Instead, the players spoke to the lich, and they tried to withhold information and deceive him but he cast dominate monster on Bruce who then spilled everything. Their quest, why they were seeking out Xalatra, and their connection to the Lady of Pain. The connection to the Lady was of particular interest to him, since she was their sworn enemy and they were constantly living under a sort of Sword of Damocles that if she discovered them they'd be wiped out. However, the Lich picked up on the groups importance to the Lady of Pain, and immediately realized it was in his best interest if the players succeeded in their quest. Should they die, it could draw the attention of the Lady to their sequestered court and their imminent demise. So, the Lich made a sacrifice. He cast a spell that destroyed his phylactery and instead made Bruce his phylactery. He would live inside Bruce and could only be removed when Vecna was freed. This would bind the group to his cause, and since the Inbetweeners were so important to the Lady of Pain, she might be willing to free Vecna in return for their assistance. It was a long shot, but the remaining followers were dwindling, either by leaving or other forms of attrition. It was clear Vecna wasn't going to be freed on the current course,

The way this worked mechanically is that the lich could perceive anything Bruce perceived, and take control of Bruce through a contested wisdom save if Bruce did anything not in his best interest. His soul was tied to Bruce's, so any attempt to dislodge or remove him would risk destroying Bruce's soul. The only way to get the lich out was for him to voluntarily leave. Hence, new side quest for the group—deal with Bruce's possession. It wasn't all bad though, Bruce could tap into some of the Lich's powers if the Lich agreed to it and also the Lich would act to ensure Bruce didn't die. The Lich instructed his group to wait for further instruction, and stay hidden here in the meantime. This was the best leverage they've had on the Lady of Pain, and he would make the most of it.

After that, the followers of Vecna provided the players instructions and let them know they saw Xalatra pass through months ago. She was headed deeper... towards The Maw. Her mental state was fractured, and she was so dangerous that even the entire court of powerful undead did not want to test her, and they instead let her pass through and disabled her potent glyphs left behind.

And I think I'll leave it there. Bruce is the phylactery of the head surviving lich of Vecna (surviving is a funny word here but... you get the idea).

Shorter post, but I've been dragging my feet on writing these and I have a lot in the backlog so I figure I will get some down when I can to keep up the momentum. Next up, the showdown with Xalatra!

Sometimes we are guided to a person, place, or thing to learn that we don’t want those things. Will you recognize the pattern and take action to break the cycle? Or will you stay stuck in self-pity or blame others for your misfortune? It’s up to us.

S.N.I.t. ; Vijftien Minuten Roem voor Vijf Euro

Ik heb mijn vijftien minuten voor een vijfje te koop gezet op marktplaats er heeft nog niemand naar de aanbieding gekeken iedereen denkt dat er voldoende plaats is voor hun eigen talenten maar als ik al niet aan de bak kom dan is de kans dat jij het wel komt bijzonder klein minimaal ze zijn niet in voor roekeloos spelen met taal je zal moeten doen wat anderen voor je hebben gedaan dan voor een zakcentje extra zien ze je even in hun schaduw staan laat maar lopen dan los laten en door gaan ik doe het wel zonder loon naar werken zonder applaus, uitgesproken waardering en een nummertje in de bovenhoek je mag mijn vijftien minuten hebben met bonus schrikkel seconde ik laat de prijs voor je zakken nog even en je kan het zo meepakken voor nop zoals ik alles weggeef en ook naar leef zonder belang, zonder opsmuk, zonder doel alleen op gevoel op puur instinct zeg ik alles wat ik denk laat maar gaan van voor naar achter en weer terug twee handen op een buik, alles mijn eigen en geen zwaar houten kruis als loden last op de rug van links naar rechts van onder naar boven van boven naar rechts en van links naar beneden schitterend in volstrekt onbekend verleden en heden voor iedereen onopvallend in erkers en nissen optreden diep verborgen in de donkerste schaduwen ben ik voor eeuwig de uwe niemand die me hoeft te kennen die de kost voor mij moet winnen of ermee die ruimte voor mij moet vrij maken in een media kast geld moet uitgeven voor mijn nabijheid me niet hoeft mee te torsen als stoffig omhulsel dat amper om het moede lijf past je mag me gerust vergeten, hoeft mijn naam nooit te droppen geen credtis te geven en geen royalties ik ben gewoon je beste onzichtbare vriend die iedere keer als ik zelf wil en kan je met lappen tekst op een wit gelijkend blaadje bediend je mag alles over me zeggen, ik hoor het niet en als ik dat wel doe dan negeer ik het anderen gaan niet voor mij en ik ga zelf ook niet rond met de pet daar gooi ik wel zo nu en dan mee maar ik denk dat u mij dat voor het gemak wel vergeeft niet waar over waar gesproken, de vijftien minuten gaan nu voor 1 en negenennegentig euro cent weg het is het toppunt van de roem, nooit slecht vers, heeft bijna tien jaar op de bovenkamer stil gestaan in een oude loopschoenendoos bij de hoge stapel bewaard oefenmateriaal, compleet zinloos klik het tenminste even aan doe dan even alsof je interesse hebt in mijn kwartier spotlicht beschouw het als je minst vervelende plicht als roem als handelswaar al niet voldoet komt het dan ooit nog een keer goed zoals iets schijnt te doen als je iets anders een keertje per ongeluk goed doet onbewust van het goede van je daad maakt mij niet uit als je maar even op die flikkerende link staat die ik voor je heb aangemaakt mijn roem is de beste ooit in ieder geval beter dan nooit ik stuur het vanaf daar rechtstreeks op naar je waarschijnlijk zeer aantrekkelijk kop om over de rest maar niet te zwijgen hiermee kun je voor 900 tellen de successen aaneenrijgen één vijftig, lager ga ik niet, inpakken en wegwezen het nut er van, er in opgenomen, geabsorbeerd, zal je worden bewezen je hoeft niet eens kleine lettertjes te lezen en ook niet drie handtekeningen op een formulie neer te pinnen gewoon inloggen digitaal betalen en drukken op accepteren en jij zal zijn wat men anders over mij zou beweren goeie deal of niet dan een soepele overgang naar een gewenste toestand jij mijn roem ik jou één tien en we hoeven elkaar nooit in de ogen te zien allemaal voordelen voor ons allebei ik krijg een grijpstuiver van jou en jij alles van mij voor vijftien vette minuten ben jij hipper dan ik ooit zal zijn

i spoke too soon about fixing my sleep schedule. im back to sleeping at ridiculous hours and waking up when the rest of the world has finished its day. maybe daylight isnt for me anymore. ive tried to make it work, but i don’t think we’re getting along anymore. maybe we will later on. anyway, ive been having a harder time controlling myself lately. my emotions, mostly. anger, fear, jealousy, all of them. i cant seem to keep any of it under control, and its getting irritating. i thought id gotten past this but apparently i didnt. ive changed, for the better, id like to think. i dont miss the person i used to be. i know exactly what im capable of becoming, and i have no interest in going back to that. i wouldnt want to see that version of myself again, let alone become him. but lately it feels like im having to fight myself over the most basic things. i dont know how much longer i can keep doing that.

Theres something i need to do. i might regret it later, but thats a problem for later. id rather deal with that than become someone ive spent so long trying not to be. thats it.

Sincerely, My own worst company.

In Summary: * Listening to relaxing music as I eat fresh apple chunks, prepare to enter the night meds and night prayers phase of my evening, and wait patiently for the pregame programming for the night's college football game to start broadcasting.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 216.49 lbs. * bp= 151/78 (64)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:05 – 1 banana * 05:30 – pizza * 10:00 – snacking on m&m chocolate candies * 12:00 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 13:45 – pizza, Mongolian beef lunch order, fried rice, egg roll * 16:40 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 02:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:30 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:10 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap * 15:00 – watching old episodes of Classic Doctor Who * 16:30 – listen to relaxing music

Chess: * 11:50 – moved in all pending CC games, winning 1, declined an invitation to a new tournament

Ingezonden stukje ; Generaal Pardon

Hi, ik ben Generaal Pardon, ik heb een mededeling voor u aangaande de inhoud van mijn excuses gemaakt over vele op dit moment urgente zaken als ook eerdere. Er is mij opgewezen dat niet alles wat ik heb geschreven betreffende deze onderwerpen even duidelijk is, zo heb ik gezegd dat ik spijt heb als haren op mijn hoofd, terwijl ik niet meer zoveel haren op mijn hoofd heb, maar toen het gebeuren waarnaar ik in dat ingezonden stuk verwijs plaatsvond had ik nog een hele dikke bos haar. Tevens heb ik gezegd dat ik ernstig gegrieft was waarbij ernstig niet echt duidelijk werd gedefinieerd, was het ernstig zoals turend naar een onwillig, hakkelend object, een staafje dat niet in een gaatje wil, of zeer ernstig in geval van een vreselijk falen, zoals bij een humane ramp veroorzaakt door persoonlijke fouten, ik bedoelde het laatste meer dan het eerste. Er is ook gezegd dat ik voor lang niet alles wat erg is sorry heb gezegd, dat ik zeker vijf procent van de delicten waarvoor ik min of meer zijdelings verantoordelijk zou kunnen zijn niet ter sprake heb gebracht, geen afstand heb genomen van deze toch zeer kwalijke zaken waarin onnodig veel schade is berokkend aan heel veel mensen, het merendeel verkerend in onmacht. Daarom zeg ik u nu dat dit allemaal niet de bedoeling was, abusievelijk nam ik aan dat het duidelijk was dat ik voor alles waarvoor ik heel zacht ter verantwoording kon worden geroepen ook mijn verantwoording heb genomen ook al heb ik dit niet nadrukkelijk gezegd. Ik hoop dat ik hiermee en ook met de komende vijf ingezonden stukken binnenkort te lezen op mijn weblocatie generaalpardon.com aan ieders excuus wensen zal hebben voldaan zodat iedereen verder kan en ik dus ook met het aansturen van mijn vele meelijopwekkende divisies vol dappere doch empathische para-soldaten, het excuus voor een leger. Sorry, sorry, en nogmaals sorry.

Ik wens u veel sterkte de komende minuten.

Why write now?

I rarely navigate the internet without bumping into LLM-generated content. A simple search for throat pain relief generates summaries I never asked for and points me to websites made for bots rather than humans. Does anyone need a top 13 list of pain relievers?

At work we embrace AI maybe a little too much. I find myself proof-reading strategic documents that explain concepts so verbosely that their authors never bothered reading them. Even simple messages, email or Slack, regularly carry the handwriting of the model du jour. As if we don't trust ourselves with writing anymore.

Oddly, this flood of text has led me to rediscover blogs. I imagine their authors typing on clicking keyboards rather than dictating instructions to an LLM.

I have been reading their posts and musings with great joy, impressed by how concise the writing is, how fresh it sounds with all its imperfections that are not at all imperfect to me. They stand in stark contrast to the slop I read every day and make me feel more connected to the author.*

Now I want to write my own thoughts, somewhat coherently, on my own clicky keyboard. Foremost, to help sort my thinking. And one day, who knows, for others to read or even enjoy.

* This is not a black-and-white case against LLM-aided writing. For example, SmarterArticles describes how “AI” aids their writing process, and I enjoy reading their results.