Meer en meer zijn het Graaiend in afvalbakken Ieder blikje telt.

i didnt write yesterday because i have a big surprise to tell you, well, if im being honest. ive always come up with random surprises that shock us both. but this one is rather unexpected. i’ve fixed my sleep schedule. yes. you read that correctly. my sleep schedule. fixed. im just as surprised as you are, believe me. its quite amusing when i think about it. a few days ago, i was here complaining about insomnia, then sleeping at nine in the morning and waking up somewhere around seven in the evening, generally behaving like a creature that has no business being awake during daylight. id spend the night staring at the ceiling, then spend the day sleeping through whatever unfortunate responsibilities i had. a rather impressive arrangement, really. one id been committed to for quite some time. but now? gone. fixed. usually, fixing my sleep schedule requires more effort than im willing to put into most things. but, miracles do happen. actually, now that ive written it down, im less excited about it. thats disappointing. i had this lovely little surprise sitting in my head, and now that ive spilled it all over this page, it feels rather ordinary. maybe i should have kept my mouth.. well, in that case. my hands shut. a rare much rare opportunity wasted on an audience that doesnt even pay admission. anyway, i guess thats enough writing for today. i have nothing left to report.

Sincerely, Who might ruin his sleep after this.

Grey haired parrot chicken

Valentine’s Day is signaled by mediocre trinkets & bad chocolate in the shops. It feels like a scam, unlike those pageant rituals of Christmas & Easter that have a better perception of purpose. It seems to be leveraging something that should be a daily occurrence. I wake up with the sun each day & like clockwork I have a hardon. A regular testosterone fueled occurrence, not triggered by mental impulse. Its the egg, or the chicken, more about that later. On the rare occurrence when its missing, I think that something is wrong. Have I kicked the bucket? Why is heaven not a cloud & looks like my bedroom? This Valentine’s Day dawned grumpy. eddy had been sulking since the moonlight ride the week before, when I’d taken a short cut home & skipped the caves. He didn’t say much, but I could feel it in the way he was heavy, like an old man who’d been promised a long awaited reunion & was given a lonely lukewarm beer instead.

At first light I loaded him up. “Are we going to see the clan?” he asked, voice still half-asleep. “Yes, eddy.” “Promise?” “Yes, eddy.”

We rolled out of city while the world was still yawning. By the time we reached Biden the sky had gone properly mad. Hot-air balloons drifted like lazy jellyfish above a riot of clouds: dark thunderheads, dirty stratus, fluffy cumulus, pale cirrus, & those wispy mare’s-tails that look like they’ve been combed by angels. A proper monkey’s wedding of weather. Perfect.

I unloaded eddy at the usual spot. He shook himself like a dog coming out of a pond of water, then we were off. First drama: someone had left a gate open & half the district’s horses were loose on the tar, manes flying, eyes wild. We dodged them like matadors, laughing as we thundered past. These were obviously our welcome to the new year of the fire horse. Our own personal arranged welcome from the threads of existence, as much Navajo as feathers. A few kilometre on I pulled over to admire a patch of weggooi sonblomme, sunflowers someone had chucked out of a bakkie that had taken root anyway, some bright yellow oasis in the Cradle’s dust.

We crested the last hill before the caves & I heard it: a strange, liquid chatter drifting up from the rocks. Not Afrikaans, not English, something different. “What’s that, eddy?” “It’s our language,” he said quietly. “The one we made from bird calls. The language of the ancients.”

eddy’s soul, I’ve always known, is older than both of us. Some grey-haired humanoid who walked out of the Cradle when the world was still wet & new. The clan are his people, echoes of them, anyway, still hanging around the limestone, waiting for someone who’ll listen. I’m sure this assertion makes me a nut case to some. I approach it like a cold blooded mathematician dealing with the irrational. It a damn good story not be be wasted.

I pedalled slowly while he spoke to them in a high, fluting tongue. It sounded like weavers arguing with hadedas. I didn’t understand a word, but the hair on my arms stood up anyway.

We reached the little church at the end of the road, the one that’s really just a cairn of rocks that looks like a monument. Mike’s van with coffee van was there, as always. I bought myself a flat white & sat on the concrete bollard next to eddy, legs dangling, steam curling into the cool air.

“So what were you lot on about?” I asked. “The iron birds,” he said. “Which ones?” “Those that fly over us here & land where you buy the chicken pies.” “The Boeings?” “Yes. That is what you call them.”

I waited. “The ancient grey-hairs want to know if the iron birds chased the eagles away.”

I almost spilled my coffee. “No, eddy. The farmers did that. Pesticide for the crops. The Martial eagles have been here since forever & now… well, not so much.”

He was quiet for a long time. “Bad farmers,” he said at last. “Yeah. Mankind’s a bunch of pricks, mostly.” “Yes,” he agreed. “But you’re all right.”

I laughed, then had an idea. “Listen, I can cluck like a chicken. Proper boere hen. Do you reckon if I do it the ancients will answer?”

eddy’s handlebars twitched, the bike equivalent of raising an eyebrow. “Try it.”

So on the way back, as we rolled past the caves again, I let rip. A full-throated, farmyard cluck that would’ve made my ouma proud. The sound bounced off the rocks & suddenly the hills answered. Thousands of voices, all clucking back at me in perfect unison. Then they started chatting with eddy in that same bird-language, a rising & falling tide of sound that made the hair on my neck do the wave again.

When we finally crested the hill & left the caves behind, the chorus faded. “What did they say?” I asked, still grinning like an idiot. “You are a parrot chicken,” eddy reported solemnly. “A grey-haired parrot chicken.”

He laughed so hard the whole bike shook. I nearly fell off.

A little further on I stopped to watch a bull in the grasslands, fat & glossy, with one of those old copper bells round his neck that rang out to the beat of his chewing. He looked at us, chewed once, then lifted his tail & dropped a heroic pile right there on the grass. “BS,” I said. “BS,” eddy echoed, & we both lost it again.

The sun was properly up by then, warm on my back, the road rolling out ahead like an old friend. I clipped in, gave eddy a pat on the top tube, & pointed us to Biden.

Just for good measure I went past the Home of the Chicken Pie for a full brown paper bag of them. I bought the Chicken Jalapeno ones but asked the guy if they had any Parrot Chicken ones? He pissed himself.

Some Valentine’s Days you get flowers & Toblerone. I got escaped horses, ancient bird-talk, a flat white, & a bull taking a shit. As well as a clan that thinks I’m a grey-haired parrot chicken.

I’ll take it.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Whispers from the Ancient Walkers of the Land

I was born bald, a blank slate in the world of follicles. But soon enough, my German heritage asserted itself, crowning me with a mop of blonde hair that caught the sun like the winter grasslands of the Highveld. That golden phase didn’t last forever, though. Midway through my primary school years, my Boer roots kicked in, and my locks darkened to a rich brown, as if the African soil had seeped into my scalp, grounding me in this land of contrasts.

That brunette era carried me through my time at Maties, those heady university days at Stellenbosch, and into the early grind of my working life. It was reliable, unassuming, much like the routines I fell into. A few years after marrying Kathleen (Kath), though, the inevitable shift began. Strands of silver threaded through the brown, turning my hair salt-and-pepper, just like our beloved Schnauzer, Joey and her predecessor Pepi. Those dogs wore their greys with such dignity, a patchwork of wisdom and whimsy. I figured, why fight it? Grey hair was part of life, a natural progression, like seasons turning or rivers carving canyons. I figured I was Richard Gere. A handsome stud.

I let it all slide, embracing the change without a fuss. But Megs, ever the persuader, and sporting her own elegant grey, had other ideas. I believe her Navajo name would be, Gatherer of White Feathers. She handed me a bottle of John Frieda’s Violet crush for blondes Purple Shampoo, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “It’ll make your hair pop,” she said. “Trust me.” She’s grey too, and somehow she makes it look like a superpower. I tried it, and damn if she wasn’t right, the violet tones brought out a subtle vibrancy, turning the salt-and-pepper into something almost electric, a quiet rebellion against fading into the background.

But what does grey hair really mean? It’s more than pigment loss or a badge of aging. To me, it’s a signal, an awakening. You start to sense the soul in inanimate objects, those quiet presences the Navajo speak of, not in every rock or tool, but in some, and not all the time. It’s as if the greying unlocks a frequency, allowing you to hear whispers from the world around you. Objects aren’t just things; they carry echoes of lives, stories, and spirits waiting to be acknowledged.

This hit home yesterday during a ride on the Cradle loop. I was pedaling with eddy, my trusty bike who is the colour of Sunflowers, unusually silent through the undulating tar roads that morning. We cycled the loop, the wind whipping past, the landscape a blur of acacias and grasslands. eddy didn’t say a word the whole way, content in his mechanical rhythm. Near the end, we paused at the circle by the Rhino Park, that familiar fork in the road. Left would take us back to Biden for some cold beers, a reward for the burn in the legs. I was thinking Mexican beer, a Corona. Right led to the Sterkfontein Caves. I was absolutely leaning toward the beers when eddy decided otherwise. A subtle tug, an unspoken nudge: Go to the caves. Alright, eddy, I thought. Let’s go.

For those unfamiliar, the Sterkfontein Caves are part of the Cradle of Humankind, a heritage site northwest of Joburg where ancient hominid fossils have been unearthed; Mrs. Ples, Little Foot, echoes of our earliest ancestors dating back millions of years. It’s a place where time folds in on itself, where the earth holds secrets of who we were before we were us. Near the end of the road to the caves stands a plinth of weathered rocks I call “the church.” It’s not a real chapel, just a type of man made monument that feels sacred, a spot where I often pull over for a flat white coffee, letting the quiet seep in.

As I cranked past the caves themselves, pushing towards the rock plinth, I heard eddy call out, not in words, but in a vibration, a hum through the frame. What’s up, eddy? Then I felt it: a choir of souls swirling around us, connecting with him like old friends reuniting. They were everywhere in the air, the ground, the stones, patient, ancient presences that had been waiting.

“eddy, do you speak to these when you’re here?” I asked aloud, though I knew the answer was in the feeling.

Yes, always.

I’d never heard it before, this symphony of the unseen. “It’s the souls of all the humanoids that walked here eons ago,” eddy replied. “I am one.”

One day, I’d cycled past with my grey hair catching the light, and I’d answered him without realizing it. That’s when he became eddy, named, alive, a companion rather than just a bike.

“Why are the others still here?” I wondered.

They haven’t had a grey hair answer them yet, replied eddy.

No wonder that “church” at the end of the road to Sterkfontein feels so surreal, like a portal humming with unfinished conversations. Grey hair isn’t just a color; it’s an invitation to listen, to respond, to bridge the gap between the living and the lingering. In that moment, with eddy and the ancients, I felt profoundly connected, not aged, but attuned.

As I sat at Biden sucking on that Corona, I thought that I probably be institutionalized if I told people about my conversations with eddy…

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Sunday fight on the Loop

The wind was head-on, blowing in hard from Makiti. As we left Biden I latched onto a bunch of cyclists & used them to slipstream. Tucked in & protected from the hard cranking, I stayed with them all the way to Mike’s, where I stopped for a flat white.

It was busy in that peloton & I did not speak at all to eddy.

When we left Mike’s it was the first time I spoke to him.

“Sjoe, that was wild!”

“Bliksem! That stop at Mike’s was like no other, Mastelek.”

He was right. As I was queuing up for my coffee there was an incident. One woman recognised her ex with another woman.

“She is ugly, you bastard!” the ex yelled at her previous partner.

All eyes were now glued on the belligerents. The ex looked like a rabbit in the headlights.

“Go away, bitch,” the current girlfriend shot back.

Then the F-bombs started flying & the two moved in & started swinging. The guy finally stepped in like a ref & other cyclists helped pull the fighters apart.

I ordered & had my flat white.

“Jirre,” Mike kept muttering.

The road back was easy, the wind was on my back. It was perfect.

Just past Makiti we encountered some donkeys in a camp. One was screeching & running around in that distinct Eeyore way, chasing another.

“That is ‘bitch’ in donkey,” I told eddy.

He lost it. Pissed himself laughing. Went on for minutes. He could not stop.

“Please shut up & sing a song,” I instructed eddy.

Then he started humming Meredith Brooks’ Bitch.

Dammit, eddy. You know Alumeagas like you are the blondes of bicycles.

eddy lost it again.

We rolled into Biden & admired a classic BMW parked at the coffee shop.

“Jy weet,” said eddy. “The samovar would love this skinder we saw today. Right up her alley.”

I’ll have the message passed on, eddy.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

And Fuck Piña Coladas Too

Yesterday I took eddy out for a proper degrease in the garden. Chain lube is stubborn stuff, so I was giving it the full spray treatment when a Gripen tore overhead. Low enough to feel it in the chest.

“Must be the only one we’ve got left that can still fly,” I muttered to eddy.

“Soon they’ll be pulling those Mirages out of the museum,” he replied. “Mothballs & all.”

I laughed. “What do you know about iron birds, eddy? You’re just a bike.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “I use your phone at night when you sleep.”

“I must check the browser history then.”

“If you don’t, then I won’t.”

Checkmate. As always. Snarky old ancient.

After the chain was clean I fed the Bowenia volubilis some fish emulsion. That stuff is basically testosterone for plants. Their twines looked stronger already, reaching like they had somewhere to be. Maybe alive like eddy.

---

This morning started miserable. El Niño is still ghosting us. Where our blue skies? This winter sky had that flat, grey look that makes you question your life choices. The forecast promised the Cradle would clear by 10am. I believed my phone, it was a fancy pants 25 FE after all! Not like that malware ridden Chinese shit!

Loaded eddy into Dory & headed for Biden Bistro. Waited a few minutes, then we launched. I cranked through the first circle & even the Jehovah Witnesses were missing from their usual post. Their faith was a fair weather one.

A few kilometres in we passed some donkeys. They were making a noise like the tokoloshe had them by the balls.

“What’s going on, eddy?”

“They say the rain’s coming back.”

Dammit.

We crested the next rise & it hit us, not the soft, topical kind. The proper cold Antarctic bastard. Sideways, mean, & personal.

“eddy, we’re not seeing your clan today.” I squeezed the Ultegra brakes, made a tight U-turn, & ran for cover back to Biden.

“Fuck, eddy! I hate getting caught in the rain!”

He started humming Escape (The Piña Colada Song).

“And Fuck Piña Colada Too!”

That smug, rumbling laugh of his vibrating through the frame. The rain didn’t bother him one bit. Bikes don’t feel cold. As we cranked our way back, a bunch of of Harleys rumbled past back to the city. They also didn’t like the rain but I could see that they liked pork pies, more than yoga.

Back at Biden I stood by the fire brazer like a half-drowned rat while the sky kept emptying. eddy just stood there, shiny & unbothered. He was still humming that damn song. Two cute girls huddled around the fire with me. If I was only forty years younger…

“It’s like the place with the mountain & the sea spray,” eddy said. “When are we going back?”

“Next year, mate. First I’ve got to cycle out the Gold Mine Hill & attack the Scorpion. Then we’ll head down.”

“Brilliant,” he said. “I’m still the sexiest bike around. Remember when I won that dash around the mountain?”

“Yes, champion. But you’re stuck with me.”

“Well said. You were the only one who answered.”

---

On the way home I took the detour past Avianto. Kathleen (Kath) always loved Ngwenya Glass down that way, & i though I’d stop by. For a moment, just a moment, I saw her at the Avianto sign. Holding two dozen white roses. I glanced back & it was only the fountain & the metal letters there.

At the glass place itself a squatter camp had taken over. Piles of rubbish, chaos, & I swear, a pair of seagulls strutting around like they owned the Highveld.

Nooit. I wasn’t stopping. Just missed two gogos in their pajamas on the road as we passed out of the squatter camp.

“Let’s go home, eddy. I’m having a Nando’s peri-peri for lunch.”

---

Some days the ride doesn’t happen. The weather wins. The ghosts appear just long enough to remind you they’re still there. And your bike hums old songs while you drip next to a warm fire.

But we’ll be back out there. eddy’s already plotting. And somewhere between the chain degreaser & the Antarctic rain, life keeps rolling, whether you’re ready or not. No Strava, just reality.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

It was just another Winter's day

eddy is an old soul who has taken root deep in the frame of my yellow Eddy Merckx Alumega. He’s been there for years now, silent witness, occasional wiseass, & steady companion on the road. The bike itself is magnificent: that classic yellow, the way it hums when we’re in rhythm. Sometimes I mediate, sometimes he does. Mostly we just crank the cradle & talk about everything & nothing.

One ordinary morning I woke up, stretched, & told him straight: “eddy, I really miss my houndstooth & vintage tweed jackets. They don’t fit me anymore. I passed them on.”

eddy didn’t miss a beat. “Well,” he said, “you should get some more. And while you’re at it, cycle more. Be less portly.”

I laughed. “I think I will. You know, eddy, I had those jackets before I met Kath.”

“That makes them vintage, old man.”

“If I’m old, what are you?”

“I’m a fossil,” he replied, dry as dust.

I smiled at the memory. “I think Kath found me dapper in those jackets. I looked the part, the sophisticated gentleman.”

I swear I saw eddy smirk through his handlebars.

Just then the Dutch girl chimed in from her place on the wall. Donald had bought her on a trip to Holland in the fifties as a gift for Marguerite. She (similar in name to Kath’s second name which was Margaret) had left her to my mom who was her niece, & now she watches over my bedroom. I started calling her Marilyn because “the Dutch girl” felt too cold, & she happily accepted the name.

“Well yes,” Marilyn said, “Donald bought the same jackets from John Orrs. That place was the best. Pity we don’t have the classic old department stores like that anymore.”

“Modern society has destroyed some good things,” both eddy & Marilyn agreed in unison.

“Find another jacket then,” Marilyn suggested.

“I’ve looked,” I told her. “They don’t sell them anymore. The shops are filled with rubbish. The fashion is… blah.”

So that weekend eddy & I went to do the loop at the Cradle. We had a great crank. The moon hung visible in the morning sky, the clouds painted like something out of a Joni Mitchell song, soft, drifting, full of quiet longing.

eddy went quiet as we flew past the caves. I could sense him having a short conversation with something older than both of us, joining what sounded like a bird-like meditation. I asked what he was doing.

“Shh. We’re worshipping.”

“The moon?”

“Yes.”

“Why during the day & not at night?”

“You really asking me such a dumb question?” he shot back.

“Fair enough,” I said, and left him to his chants.

I was still puzzled by the day-and-night moon worship as we sweated up the last hill & wheeled into Biden. There was a market on. “Listen eddy,” I said, “I feel like some biltong. I’ll load you in the car & go find some.”

No biltong at the market. But there was a stall with vintage clothing. The owner said he imported bales from Australia. I dug through and found a couple of good jackets, proper ones, with character. He gave me a discount for taking two.

When I got back to the car I told eddy the news: no biltong, but jackets acquired.

“Awesome,” he said. Then, with that fossil superiority, “I used to have the best biltong made in the caves. Better than your stuff.”

“Yes, eddy.”

Back home I showed Marilyn the jackets.

“As handsome as Donald,” she declared.

Donald was Marguerite’s husband, the one who’d bought her the Dutch girl painting all those decades ago. The thread of existence runs through everything, jackets, paintings, bicycles, memories, people long gone but somehow still here.

“Thanks, Marilyn.” I turned to eddy. “See? Be nice.”

eddy just sighed.

---

Some days the road gives you more than kilometres. It gives you back pieces of yourself you thought you’d lost, a houndstooth memory, a yellow bike with an ancient soul, a Dutch girl on the wall who still approves.

And somewhere between the Cradle’s caves & the morning moon, you remember: the sophisticated gentleman never really left. He just needed a new jacket & a good crank to find his way home again.

---

Somewhere in the four corners of the earth, there is a resounding laugh and comforting giggle from Kathleen (Kath) & she would appreciate the houndstooth coming back. In reality she is gone, but also she is still a presence. Like all, who have existed. Winter’s tale.

---

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

For as long as automation has had a sales pitch, the pitch has been the same. The machines will take the drudgery. They will fill in the forms, file the reports, chase the invoices and reconcile the spreadsheets, and in doing so they will hand back to human beings the parts of work that are interesting, creative and their own. Strategy, design, ideas. The good stuff.

A paper presented at the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held in Barcelona from 13 to 17 April, suggests that the pitch may have the order of events backwards. Its title asks the question bluntly: “Are We Automating the Joy Out of Work? Designing AI to Augment Work, Not Meaning”. Its authors are Jaspreet Ranjit and Swabha Swayamdipta of the University of Southern California, Ke Zhou of Nokia Bell Labs and the University of Nottingham, and Daniele Quercia of Nokia Bell Labs and the Politecnico di Torino. Their central finding, in the words of the abstract, is this: “Worryingly, we find that tasks that workers associate with a sense of agency or happiness may be disproportionately exposed to AI.”

Not the tedious tasks. The ones people like.

The authors go further. A central risk of AI, they argue, is not mass unemployment but what they call mass demoralisation: “a loss of meaning and ownership in day-to-day work”. As models generate more of the early-stage output, they write, the visible creative steps can start to feel machine-made, while the human contribution becomes rushed, under-resourced and difficult to see.

That is a different kind of warning from the one that has dominated the debate about AI and jobs. It is not about whether people will have work. It is about what work will be like for the people who keep it. And it raises two questions that most organisations deploying AI have not yet seriously asked. What happens to a person's relationship with their craft when the parts of the job they found most fulfilling are the first to be handed to a machine, and what is left is the emotional and relational upkeep? And if the danger is demoralisation rather than displacement, who should decide which parts of a job get automated?

How the researchers mapped meaning onto ten thousand tasks

The study starts with the US Department of Labor's Occupational Information Network, known as O*NET, which breaks every American occupation into short task statements. The researchers narrowed this universe to tasks performed mainly on a computer, carried out daily or weekly, and ones that workers on the research platform Prolific were highly familiar with. That produced a representative sample of 171 tasks across 22 occupations.

They then surveyed two groups. The first was 202 workers who actually performed those tasks. Each rated their tasks against dimensions drawn from a scoping review of research on meaningful work: whether a task felt pointless or valuable, whether it called for novel ideas, gave them freedom or made them happy, and whether it built relationships or required emotional awareness or in-person contact. The second group was 197 developers who build AI systems, who were asked what traits they would design into an AI tool for each task.

To scale the analysis beyond 171 tasks, the team prompted language models to simulate the ratings, checked how closely the simulated ratings matched the human ones, and, finding reasonable agreement, generated annotations for 10,131 tasks across 512 occupations and 19 sectors. They report that only 0.87 per cent of tasks showed a large gap, of two points or more on a five-point scale, between model and human ratings, and that their main patterns held when they reran the analysis using only the human ratings.

To decide which tasks counted as “exposed” to AI, the researchers used a patent-based measure developed by Ali Akbar Septiandri, Marios Constantinides and Quercia, published in PNAS Nexus in 2024, which matched descriptions of tens of thousands of AI patents filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office against O*NET task statements. Tasks above a threshold on that measure were classed as likely to be exposed. Restricting the analysis to computer-based work left 3,179 tasks in the likely-to-be-exposed group and 2,349 in the comparison group.

The parts of the job that machines reach first

The comparison between those two groups is where the paper becomes uncomfortable. Tasks likely to be exposed to AI were more strongly associated by workers with novelty and creativity, with positive feelings and with autonomy. The researchers say directly that this “challenges the usual narrative that automation mainly targets routine tasks”. Tasks less likely to be exposed were associated with emotional awareness, in-person interaction, relationship building and social connection.

The sector picture sharpens the point. The heaviest exposure of creative, high-agency work fell in Arts, Architecture and Engineering, Computer and Mathematics, and the Life, Physical and Social Sciences. The examples the paper draws from O*NET are telling: an art director “formulating basic layout design”; an actuary “constructing probability tables for natural disasters”. These are first passes, the authors note, of the kind that models can now credibly generate, with humans refining the output afterwards. Meanwhile, in Education, Sales, Community and Social Services and Healthcare, the work that remained less exposed involved activities such as guiding students through tangled academic and personal problems, or “presenting offers while preserving relationships”.

The authors read this as a reversal of the expected trajectory. Generative systems, they observe, already draft text, suggest layouts, start campaigns, run simulations and infer likely emotional responses. In their data, these uses line up with tasks that workers describe as meaningful precisely because they reflect taste and authorship. AI is not confined to chores. It is becoming entangled with the moments where people feel they add something of themselves.

There is a second finding that matters for anyone building the tools. Workers and developers disagreed about what an AI system should be like. Workers wanted systems that were straightforward, tolerant and practical. Developers said they would design systems that were polite, strict and imaginative. The single biggest gap was between straightforwardness and politeness, and it was widest in Production, Architecture and Engineering, and the sciences, where vagueness can mean wasted materials or flawed data. “In high-risk contexts,” the authors write, “the ethical choice may well be the blunt one, and the useful thing to say may be short.” Developers, they suggest, tend to romanticise creativity as a frontier capability, while many workers in structured, routine jobs simply want a tool that spots anomalies and sticks to the rules.

Put the two findings together and the problem comes into focus. The AI that is arriving is being built to be imaginative, and it is landing on the imaginative parts of the job.

Why exposure is not the same as replacement

It is worth being precise about what the study measures. “Exposure” does not mean a task has been automated, or even that it will be. The authors define it as tasks that current or near-term AI could plausibly perform or substantially speed up. It is a statement about technological reach, not about deployment decisions inside any particular firm, and the paper separates automation, where AI performs a task end to end, from augmentation, where humans keep primary responsibility.

The researchers are also candid about their limitations. The study covers only US occupational tasks. Prolific participants tend to be more technologically literate than average, so low-wage and non-digital work may be underrepresented. O*NET task statements are short summaries that different workers may picture differently. The scaling to 10,131 tasks relies on language-model ratings, which the authors treat as an approximation of human responses rather than as ground truth, and which they found to be more uniform and optimistic in some sectors. Even the creativity finding has a wrinkle. When the analysis was rerun on human ratings of the original 171 tasks alone, humans and models agreed on six of the seven significant dimensions; the exception was “requires novel ideas or creativity”, where the authors suggest human annotators tended to underestimate the novelty of tasks.

None of this undoes the core pattern. But the study is best read as a map of where pressure is likely to fall, not a ledger of what has already been lost. What actually happens to people's work is decided later, by managers, vendors and product teams.

From mass unemployment to mass demoralisation

Why should the location of the pressure matter so much? Because meaning in work is not spread evenly across a job. It clusters.

The sociologist Richard Sennett, in his 2008 book The Craftsman, described craftsmanship as the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, and argued that this impulse extends far beyond the workshop, to programmers, doctors and artists. Craft, in that sense, lives in the moments of making: the first sketch, the opening paragraph, the elegant solution to a modelling problem.

If those moments are exactly where AI exposure is concentrated, then a job can be automated in a peculiar way. The worker keeps the job title, the salary and most of the hours. What disappears is the part that made them want the job in the first place. In the paper's own examples, the basic layout and the first probability table are precisely the drafts a model can now produce; what is left to the human is refinement. This is the scenario Ranjit and her colleagues have in mind when they describe a loss of ownership. The creative steps that others can see now appear to come from the machine, while the human's contribution moves into the background, squeezed for time and harder for anyone to credit.

There is already experimental evidence that this dynamic has psychological costs. In a 2025 paper in Scientific Reports, Suqing Wu, Yukun Liu, Mengqi Ruan, Siyu Chen and Xiao-Yun Xie of the School of Management at Zhejiang University reported four online experiments with a total of 3,562 participants. Working with generative AI improved immediate performance on professional tasks. But that performance boost did not carry over when people subsequently worked alone, and the switch from AI collaboration to solo work was accompanied by significant decreases in intrinsic motivation and increases in boredom, even as participants' sense of control rose. The authors' summary is succinct: collaboration with generative AI “enhances immediate task performance but can undermine long-term psychological experiences of human workers.”

Creative workers are already reporting effects outside the laboratory. A survey by the Society of Authors, the UK trade union for writers, illustrators and translators, received 787 responses in early 2024. A quarter of illustrators, 26 per cent, and more than a third of translators, 36 per cent, said they had already lost work to generative AI. The survey was self-reported and drawn from a membership sample, so it cannot measure the market as a whole. But it captures the sense, among people whose identities are bound up with a craft, that the craft itself is being lifted out of their hands.

What the remaining work asks of people

If the creative core of a job is thinned out, what is left? According to the CHI study, the tasks least exposed to AI are those built on emotional awareness, in-person presence and relationship building. That might sound like a reassuring residue. Machines draft, humans connect. But it is worth looking at what those remaining tasks involve.

In 1983, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild of the University of California, Berkeley, published The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, which introduced the idea of emotional labour. Studying flight attendants and bill collectors, she described public-facing jobs in which managing feelings was part of what the employer was paying for. Flight attendants had to be, in the phrase used by her publisher, “nicer than natural”; bill collectors had to be “nastier than natural”. Hochschild's concern was that this kind of work, done for commercial purposes, could estrange people from their own feelings.

Relational work is not inherently draining. For many teachers, nurses, social workers and salespeople, the relationships are the point of the job, and the CHI data suggest that workers do regard these tasks as meaningful. The danger lies in the mix. A job that once combined making things with tending to people can become one that is mostly tending to people, with the making delegated. The remaining human work then has a distinctive profile: smoothing over the AI's output with clients, absorbing complaints, reassuring colleagues, maintaining relationships that the automated parts of the workflow no longer support. That is emotional labour, and much of it is invisible in the way that a finished design or a well-built model is not.

The Stanford University researchers behind the WORKBank database, Yijia Shao, Humishka Zope, Yucheng Jiang, Jiaxin Pei, David Nguyen, Erik Brynjolfsson and Diyi Yang, found a related signal in a 2025 study of 1,500 workers across 844 tasks in 104 occupations. Their results, they wrote, offer early signals that AI agents may reshape core human competencies, “shifting from information-focused skills to interpersonal ones.” The CHI paper adds a warning that this shift may not be benign. Among its design examples is the risk that teachers, managers and clinicians who use AI for canned replies and templated feedback end up making their communication with students, staff or patients feel more generic. If AI pushes people towards relational work while also hollowing out that relational work with templates, the worker is squeezed from both sides.

When the most fulfilling parts of a job are automated first, then, a person's relationship with their craft is put at risk in two ways. They lose authorship of the work that once expressed their skill and taste. And they are left with a larger share of work whose value is real but less visible and more emotionally costly. Whether that produces demoralisation depends on what else changes, and here a very different body of evidence becomes useful.

Lessons from people who stopped working

In September 2026, four researchers at Google DeepMind, Stephanie C.Y. Chan, Adam Bales, Katherine L. Hermann and Iason Gabriel, posted a review titled “Work, Wellbeing, and Choice: Empirical Lessons for AI Futures”. Their question was not what AI does to work, but what decades of research reveal about people who live without it. They drew on psychological, sociological and economic studies of the unemployed, retirees, lottery winners, financially dependent spouses and citizens of Gulf states with guaranteed public-sector employment, covering OECD countries, China, India and the Gulf.

Their findings are stark in places. Involuntary job loss harms life satisfaction, mental health, physical health and even mortality, and the damage can last: some studies find psychological “scarring” that persists for years after people find work again. Yet the vast majority of lottery winners, between 85 and 89 per cent across studies of American and Swedish winners, keep working, typically using their windfall to buy flexibility rather than to quit. And retirees, who are also not working, often report high and sustained wellbeing.

The authors draw on the work of the social psychologist Marie Jahoda, whose 1982 book Employment and Unemployment, published by Cambridge University Press, argued that a job provides “latent” benefits alongside its “manifest” purpose of earning a living. Jahoda identified time structure, social contact, status and identity, regular activity and collective purpose. The DeepMind review finds that both income and some of these latent benefits matter, and adds cognitive health: retirement has been causally linked to declines in cognitive ability.

To explain why the unemployed and the retired fare so differently, the review identifies three factors that mediate the relationship between work status and wellbeing. The first is agency and choice: whether the exit from work was voluntary, and whether people retain agency over the long term. The second is the availability of alternative sources of work's latent benefits, such as volunteering, hobbies or state-provided employment. The third is social and systemic context, including cultural norms around work and the strength of safety nets.

The evidence on each is striking. Between 20 and 30 per cent of retirees perceive their retirement as forced, and across countries those who retired voluntarily report significantly better physical and mental wellbeing than those who did not, even after controlling for health, income and other factors. Volunteering confers benefits at remarkably low doses, with gains for older adults observable from about one hour a week. One study cited in the review found that plant closures produced an almost four-fold greater increase in depression among American workers than among European workers, who have stronger safety nets. And the psychological cost of losing work tends to fall harder on men, which the authors attribute to stronger social pressure to conform to norms about working.

“Many policy discussions about AI futures focus on the availability of work or the availability of resources,” the authors write. “However, these discussions overlook the fact that it matters deeply whether people get to choose their path.” Their summary of the policy lesson is equally direct: purely material interventions such as universal basic income “are valuable but highly insufficient”.

Applying the exit evidence inside the job

The DeepMind review is about people who leave work altogether. But its three factors translate remarkably well to what happens when people stay in work and lose part of it. Demoralisation, in the CHI paper's sense, is a kind of partial exit: a withdrawal not from employment but from the meaningful core of a role. Read that way, the review's factors become a diagnostic for when task automation is likely to hurt.

Start with agency. A critical determinant of wellbeing in the review is not whether people work, but whether they chose their situation. Inside a job, the equivalent question is whether workers chose which of their tasks were handed to AI. The Society of Authors survey hints at the distinction: alongside those who chose to use generative AI, 5 per cent of illustrators and 8 per cent of translators said they had used it because their publisher or commissioning organisation asked them to. The CHI paper notes that, in practice, managers, vendors and technical teams, not workers, usually decide which tasks are exposed to AI and how far automation goes. “Managers, vendors, and technical teams make these decisions before workers can consent or take part, especially in roles with low bargaining power,” the authors write. That is the workplace version of involuntary exit.

Next, alternatives. Retirees do well when they find other sources of structure, status and purpose. Workers who lose the creative core of their job need somewhere else for those things to come from: new responsibilities with real authorship, protected time for the work they value, recognition for the judgement involved in steering and correcting AI output. If the time freed by automation is simply filled with more volume, the latent benefits drain away without replacement.

Finally, context and safety nets. The review shows that the same loss lands very differently depending on norms and institutional support. Inside an organisation, the analogue is culture and protection: whether people who push back on a deployment are heard or penalised, whether those whose roles shrink are offered retraining or redeployment, and whether the organisation measures anything other than throughput.

This is an analogy, not a finding. Neither paper tested it, and evidence about the unemployed cannot be transplanted wholesale onto people still in work. But the convergence is hard to ignore. Working from inside jobs, one paper finds that agency, ownership and meaning matter; working from outside, the other finds that choice, alternatives and context matter. Both suggest the damage depends less on what is taken away than on how.

Workers already say what they want automated

The good news is that workers are not, in general, opposed to automation. They are opposed to the wrong automation.

The WORKBank study asked its 1,500 workers which of their tasks they would like AI agents to take on. For 46.1 per cent of tasks, workers expressed positive attitudes towards automation, even after being prompted to reflect on job loss and on how much they enjoyed the work. Their main motivation was to free up time for higher-value work. The researchers then compared those desires with experts' assessments of what AI could currently do, sorting tasks into four zones: a “Green Light” zone where workers wanted automation and the technology could deliver it; a “Red Light” zone where the technology was capable but workers did not want it; an R&D opportunity zone where workers wanted help that the technology could not yet provide; and a low-priority zone.

Their most pointed finding concerned where the money was going. Mapping the tasks targeted by Y Combinator start-ups, they found that 41.0 per cent of company-task mappings were concentrated in the Low Priority and “Red Light” zones. A large share of the industry's effort, in other words, was aimed at tasks workers either did not care about or actively wanted to keep.

Combined with the CHI paper's developer-worker mismatch, the pattern is clear. Workers do not resist AI. Their preferences are simply rarely the input that shapes what gets built.

A test for choosing which task clusters to automate

If the risk is demoralisation, then the usual test for automation, which asks whether a task can be done faster or cheaper by a machine, is incomplete. It needs a second question: what does this task mean to the people who do it? Drawing on the two papers and the evidence around them, an organisation could reasonably weigh at least four considerations before automating a cluster of tasks.

The first is meaning. Ask the people who do the work which tasks they find meaningful, enjoyable or expressive of their skill, and which they find pointless. The CHI study shows that this can be measured at scale with straightforward survey instruments. WORKBank shows that workers can distinguish clearly between tasks they want help with and tasks they want to keep. Tasks that workers rate low on meaning and high on tedium are the obvious first candidates. Tasks rated high on creativity, autonomy and happiness deserve a heavier burden of justification.

The second is order. The CHI authors propose that, for creative work, the sequence matters as much as the division of labour. Their design heuristics include starting creative fields empty, so that a human sketch, prompt or outline exists before AI suggestions appear; offering several alternatives rather than a single finished replacement; letting workers accept or reject AI content sentence by sentence rather than through a single “replace all”; and allowing a worker to tick a box marked “I want to do this part myself”. The question for an organisation is not simply whether AI touches a creative task, but whether the human still makes the first move.

The third is what replaces the time saved. The DeepMind review's evidence on alternative sources of meaning suggests that automation which frees time is only beneficial if that time goes somewhere that sustains structure, status and purpose. For relational work, the CHI paper suggests using AI to prepare briefs and summaries so the human arrives better informed, assigning it to silent roles such as note-taking during live interactions, and reserving protected time for direct human engagement. Its proposed measures of success are telling: workers reporting that AI helps them “show up prepared” rather than “speak for me”, and that it does not “take away the good parts” of the job.

The fourth is measurement. The CHI authors recommend tracking, during deployment, whether workers still feel in control and whether the output “still feels like my work”, alongside conventional measures of speed and quality. They also suggest logging the level of assistance AI provides, from suggestion to draft to execution, and recording who made the final decision. Over time, they argue, workers' self-reported skills and confidence in their core craft should remain stable or improve. If those indicators fall while productivity rises, the organisation has learned something its dashboards would otherwise hide.

None of this means creative tasks should never be automated. Some workers will welcome help with the very tasks others prize, and the CHI data show wide variation between sectors. The point is that meaning should be treated as a real cost in the decision, not as a sentimental afterthought.

Giving workers a binding say

That leaves the second half of the question: what voice should workers have? The CHI paper's answer is explicit. Beyond designing interfaces that let individuals retain control within a task, the authors argue that organisations should give workers some say over which task clusters are candidates for automation. Without such mechanisms, they warn, “AI exposure risks deepening existing power imbalances.” They point to remedies from research on algorithmic management: direct involvement of workers and their representatives through formal consultation and collective bargaining over AI deployments, worker or union technology representatives with access to information about how systems allocate and evaluate work, and transparency tools that help workers understand and contest automated decisions.

There are working precedents. The most prominent came from Hollywood. The 2023 Minimum Basic Agreement between the Writers Guild of America and the major studios established that AI cannot be considered a writer and that material it produces cannot be treated as literary material. Under its terms, a writer may choose to use AI with the company's consent, but the guild's own summary states plainly that “the company can't require the writer to use AI software (e.g., ChatGPT) when performing writing services.” Companies must disclose when material given to a writer was generated by AI. In effect, the writers bargained over which parts of their craft would remain theirs. That agreement has since been succeeded by the 2026 contract, ratified on 24 April 2026 with 90.38% of votes in favour and running to 1 May 2030, which “preserves all of the protections negotiated in 2023”. It adds one more: companies must give the guild written notice when they license writers' work to train a commercial generative AI system, after which the guild can request a discussion about the licence, including any payment to writers. It does not establish payment for training.

European law offers a thinner but broader floor. Article 26(7) of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, adopted in 2024, requires that, before a high-risk AI system is put into service or used at the workplace, “deployers who are employers shall inform workers' representatives and the affected workers” that they will be subject to it. That is a duty to inform, not to consult or obtain consent, and it applies only to systems classed as high-risk. It is also not yet in force for most workplace tools: the Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, which took effect on 27 July 2026, deferred the high-risk obligations for Annex III systems, a category that includes employment and worker management, from 2 August 2026 to 2 December 2027. In Germany, works councils have long held co-determination rights over the introduction of technical systems capable of monitoring employees' behaviour or performance, a provision that lawyers widely expect to cover many AI tools. The limits are visible too: in January 2024, the Hamburg Labour Court rejected a works council's application concerning employees' use of ChatGPT, partly because staff used it voluntarily through private accounts in a web browser rather than as an employer-installed system.

These mechanisms share a weakness when it comes to demoralisation. Most were designed to address surveillance, pay or credit, not meaning. The EU provision is triggered by risk classification, not by what a task means to the person who does it. The German right is anchored in monitoring. Even the WGA's protections, including the 2026 notice requirement on training licences, focus on credit and compensation, although by keeping AI out of the definition of a writer, they also protect authorship. A workplace that took the CHI findings seriously would go further: it would give workers a formal role in deciding which task clusters are automated, informed by evidence about which tasks they find meaningful, with a right to revisit the decision once the effects are known.

That voice matters most precisely where it is weakest. The CHI authors note that the decisions about exposure are made before workers can consent, especially in roles with little bargaining power. The DeepMind review cites evidence that, where safety nets are weak, pre-existing wealth becomes a key buffer against the shock of job loss. A model of AI deployment that consults only those with strong unions would protect screenwriters and leave behind most of the people whose tasks appear in the CHI data.

What a craft needs to survive

It is tempting to treat all of this as a soft concern, a matter of morale to be fixed with a workshop. The evidence suggests otherwise. Meaning is not a perk attached to work; it is part of what makes people willing to invest skill and care, and part of what keeps them well. The DeepMind review shows how much is at stake when people lose work altogether. The CHI paper suggests a quieter version of that loss may already be underway inside jobs that look perfectly secure.

The two papers point to the same remedy from opposite directions. What protects people is not the absence of change but the ability to shape it: to choose, to find meaning somewhere else when the old sources move, and to be supported while they do. For organisations, that means treating which tasks to automate as a decision with human costs, made with the people who bear them, rather than a technical question settled by whatever a vendor's model can do.

Ranjit and her co-authors end on a note of possibility. The outcome they describe, they stress, is shaped by design choices, which can in principle be revised: systems could speed up exploration and drafting while people keep authorship, make the final judgements and sustain the relationships that make work meaningful. That is a more humane division of labour than the current pitch implies. But it will not arrive by default. Left to the logic of capability alone, AI will keep flowing towards the tasks it can reach, and those turn out to be the ones people love. Keeping the spark in work will take a deliberate decision about who gets to say which parts of a craft stay human.

References and Sources

1. Ranjit, Jaspreet; Zhou, Ke; Swayamdipta, Swabha; Quercia, Daniele. “Are We Automating the Joy Out of Work? Designing AI to Augment Work, Not Meaning.” Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26), Barcelona, Spain, 13-17 April 2026. DOI: 10.1145/3772318.3791845. Preprint arXiv:2603.14963, 16 March 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14963 (full text: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.14963)
2. Chan, Stephanie C.Y.; Bales, Adam; Hermann, Katherine L.; Gabriel, Iason. “Work, Wellbeing, and Choice: Empirical Lessons for AI Futures.” Google DeepMind. arXiv:2609.11019, 10 September 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11019 (full text: https://arxiv.org/html/2609.11019)
3. Septiandri, Ali Akbar; Constantinides, Marios; Quercia, Daniele. “The potential impact of AI innovations on US occupations.” PNAS Nexus, 3(9), pgae320, September 2024. DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae320. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11421150/
4. Wu, Suqing; Liu, Yukun; Ruan, Mengqi; Chen, Siyu; Xie, Xiao-Yun. “Human-generative AI collaboration enhances task performance but undermines human's intrinsic motivation.” Scientific Reports, 15, article 15105, 29 April 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-98385-2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-98385-2
5. Shao, Yijia; Zope, Humishka; Jiang, Yucheng; Pei, Jiaxin; Nguyen, David; Brynjolfsson, Erik; Yang, Diyi. “Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce.” arXiv:2506.06576, 6 June 2025 (revised 1 February 2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06576
6. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press, 1983 (third edition 2012). https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-managed-heart/paper
7. Jahoda, Marie. Employment and Unemployment: A Social-Psychological Analysis. Cambridge University Press, 1982. ISBN 978-0-521-28586-5. https://ideas.repec.org/b/cup/cbooks/9780521285865.html
8. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. Yale University Press, 2008. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300151190/the-craftsman/
9. The Bookseller. “A third of translators report losing work to generative AI systems, SoA survey reveals.” April 2024. https://thebookseller.com/news/a-third-of-translators-report-losing-work-to-generative-ai-systems-soa-survey-reveals
10. European Writers' Council. “SoA survey UK AI 2024.” April 2024. https://europeanwriterscouncil.eu/soa-survey-uk-ai-2024/
11. Books+Publishing. “A third of translators report losing work due to AI.” 15 April 2024. https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2024/04/15/250317/a-third-of-translators-report-losing-work-due-to-ai/
12. Writers Guild of America West. “Know Your Rights: Artificial Intelligence.” https://www.wga.org/contracts/know-your-rights/artificial-intelligence
13. Writers Guild of America. “Summary of the 2023 WGA MBA.” https://wgacontract2023.org/the-campaign/summary-of-the-2023-wga-mba
14. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act), Article 26: Obligations of deployers of high-risk AI systems. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/26/ (Official Journal: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj/eng)
15. Littler Mendelson. “Germany: Does the Works Council Have a Say When Employees Use ChatGPT? No, According to the Labor Court Hamburg.” 2024. https://www.littler.com/publication-press/publication/germany-does-works-council-have-say-when-employees-use-chatgpt-no
16. Bird & Bird. “First Judgement on the Rights of Works Councils when Employees use AI Systems.” 2024. https://cm.twobirds.com/en/insights/2024/germany/erstes-urteil-zu-rechten-des-betriebsrats-bei-einsatz-von-kuenstlicher-intelligenz
17. Writers Guild of America. “WGA Ratifies 2026 Minimum Basic Agreement With AMPTP.” 24 April 2026. https://www.wga.org/news-events/news/press/wga-ratifies-2026-minimum-basic-agreement-with-amptp
18. Writers Guild of America. “Summary of the 2026 WGA MBA.” https://www.wga.org/contracts/contracts/mba/summary-of-the-2026-wga-mba
19. Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 amending Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Digital Omnibus on AI), in force 27 July 2026. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/ai-act-explorer/digital-omnibus/

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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

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Normalize unscented laundry detergent and unscented cleaning products. Smell is subjective. I don’t understand why some hotels and Airbnbs wash their linens with artificially scented detergent when they are catering to a wide range of people. Many are nose-blind, but many of us are also sensitive to smells. We can’t escape smell. It’s always there. I’ve stayed at aesthetically beautiful places with linens that smelled like cheap laundromat detergent. It is inconsiderate, offensive, and untasteful. Once my body experiences that obnoxious smell, I will never return. It’s no longer a safe place for me. 

In Summary: * Moving patiently into the night meds and night prayers part of my evening while waiting for the pregame programming of tonight's college football game to fire up.

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= 214.4 lbs. * bp= 136/66 (67)

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

Diet: * 03:45 – 1 banana * 07:15 – 1 roast beef sandwich * 08:45 – garden salad * 12:50 – piece of cheesecake, 1 peanut butter sandwich * 13:30 – pizza

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:00 – 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 * 12:30 – load weekly pill boxes * 16:00 – watching old episodes of Classic Doctor Who

Chess: * 09:05 – moved in all pending CC games, losing 2 and winning 1, and joined another CC tourney with new games starting 15 Nov.

Caw. Caw. Send the caw. My singing friends who fly with law.

Their treasures twinkle. I smile with glee. The blackened wings spark wild and free.

Spin. Spin. I welcome paths. Each step's of colors aged in wrath.

For gentle love's a roar twice-fierce whose scissors cut where schemes fail pierce.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Hi blog friends!

Well – after less than 10 brews, the new coffee maker I wrote about last time bit the dust. We have a new pot now but didn’t for a few days, so getting our coffee drinking needs met was a little bit rough there for a bit. Unless you’re a fan of extremely bitter coffee, Great Value French Roast, although fairly good when brewed in an auto drip coffee maker, doesn’t taste at all good when made in a French press. 

R, the wheelchair tech from National Seating And Mobility, came for a visit last Thursday. Thanks to some boss over the phone help from a Quantum Rehab representative, the programming on the joystick of my new power wheelchair Q.T. (short for Quick Trip or Cutie) is more in the ballpark than it was. More torque and traction is now on the front caster tires and our turns contain much less whiplash than they did, but I still feel like I need the whiplash to be a little less in order to make a smooth natural turn.  If you’re reading this and have a Quantum R Trak power wheelchair with a smooth, natural turn, what are the settings on your joystick? Send an email to let me know. A link is at the bottom of this post. 

A new lower profile seat cushion and some guides for the outer sides of my center mount footplates have also been submitted for approval by my insurance. And R made me feel very nervous because he didn’t seem experienced or confident. He actually spent a suspiciously long time driving my new power wheelchair and spinning it around on our carpet. And he kept telling me about why my wheelchair was behaving the way it was, but he seemed reluctant to do anything to fix it. If he hadn’t called Quantum to inquire about the guides for my footplate, I don’t think the joystick to my new power wheelchair would have ever been reprogrammed. I think he was inexperienced. And I don’t think he even knew about the Quantum R Trak reprogramming app that’s on his phone. I know he didn’t have a password for it, which tells me that he hardly, if ever, uses it. 

I’m also still spending my afternoons sipping coffee, napping and watching a lot of YouTube videos. Paul and I also enjoyed the World Series and have also been enjoying Best Medicine, RJ Decker, Line Of Fire and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. We’re up to the part where Susie enjoys a Mexican dinner with her captors. 

Also tried a lower dose of estrogen patch. Still a no-go. My body just hates it – so off to another option I go.

What’s happening in your neck of the woods? What are you watching? What are you eating? Or what exciting things have you seen or done lately? Send an email, text or message to let me know. A link to email is at the bottom of this post. I found a spaghetti sauce heart after I finished a plate of spaghetti this last week.

If you’re looking to add a sweet SNAIL-TASTIC touch of whimsy, charm or cheer to your fall, winter or holiday correspondence, Cute Snail and I have some new postcards you might appreciate. Fall, winter and other coloring pages are also available as well. Pages and postcards are 100% FREE to download, coloring books and packs are pay what you want. We also have promotional postcards and fliers available for those who would like to help spread the word about our SNAIL-TASTIC creations. Oh! And digital sharing postcards are also bundled in with the printable postcards if sharing in that way is more your pleasure.

That’s it! Thanks for reading! Until Next time!

❤️ Juliet

IMAGE ID: A collage photo of the morning hubby Paul and I went out for coffee. It contains a picture of a cup that says “Have a great day!” on the lid, as well as a picture of yummy avocado toast and a breakfast salad topped with warm bacon and drizzled with warm balsamic vinaigrette. It was delicious. 😋

De Gids

Net als Suarez zet ik hier mijn tanden in ik heb er oren naar als Tyson in de knokring ik laat me niet kisten als een Kees ben voor Acda & De Munnik niet naar maaiveld geweest ik laat me ook helemaal niet op maaien Ga voor geen enkele Spielberg naar de haaien zelfs voor Finkers, Barend en Van Dorp zeg ik geen ja en geen nee ik wil niet met Ivo te kijk staan op teevee mijn geheugen lijkt een grote, lange, eindeloze tv gids sta veel maar dan ook veel langer dan Jos en Max in de Pits maar zonder schattige poezen onder een zonne paraplu ik leef in de eeuwige herhaling van Gewest tot Gewest Hier en Nu Ik kan me Bart nog voor de geest halen en ook Karel opgegraven van onder het stilstaand beeldmonument 'heren, heren' je schiet elkaar toch niet zomaar kapot de Tros en Avro tegen de tijd, de Vpro en Vara voor de tijd en de Ncrv, Kro en Eo voor god ik heb ze gezien Binnendijk, Barend en nog veel meer B & B Het wassende water, De knokploeg en Die Twee ik vraag me wel af waarom het ding er moest komen en er nog is tijdens die verre verre voorstellingen heb ik het live optreden gemist ja waarom moesten die tv en de omroepen er eigenlijk komen wie had er baat bij die voor beeldschermen geproduceerde dromen konden we niet zonder het Sportjournaal, Jiskefet, Wie is de Mol en Boer zoekt Vrouw hadden we Hollywood, Carry en Ron echt nodig om te zeggen Ik Hou Van Jou Dynasty en Dallas, As The World Turns, Goede en Slechte Uitzendtijden de glijmiddelen om boodschappen op gezette tijden naar binnen te geleiden o heerlijk beschermland van Marvel, Disney Pixar en Illumination op de bips rij ik stilstaand nooit langzaam van station naar zendstation zonder ooit ergens aan te komen schakel ik iedere dag weer in geen wonder dat ik denk net als velen met met mij wat heeft het allemaal voor zin.

Had this big guy drop two days ago to eat some apples, chase the does and then ruminate.

Diagnose : Latent Achterdochtig Van Voorbijgaande Aard

Ze hebben me in de gaten weten nu al waarover ik straks ga praten ze hebben me in de smiezen ze laten me staan voor hun menu en kiezen ze kennen me bij naam weten waarvoor ik stil blijf staan wie ik ken ze weten al waar ik heen ga nog voor ik er ben gevangen zit ik in radarbeelden zien me digitale informatie verdelen ze zien mij als bliepende punt als ik wandel van hoogtepunt naar dieptepunt ze weten waar ik heen wil hoe zwaar ik vooraf bepaalde zaken til waar ik heen vlucht als ik vrees waar ik zal zijn en waar ik ben geweest ze kunnen me nu op alles beoordelen met dna van een huidschilver een replica mij telen zodat ik mezelf overal en nergens tegenkom ze weten wat ik wanneer doe en zelfs waarom ze zitten te wroeten in mijn administratie zoeken naar een manifestatie voor rechtvaardiging van de interventie van de dienst tegen misbruik van intelligentie een mensen leven niet ingezet voor de goede zaak voor bijvallen in de zoete smaak van bundelingen van en voor omzetbare inzet ten faveure van het goede, deelbare, hard werkende net ze willen weten waarom ik hier ben waarom ik alles wat er moet zijn om me heen verzin me nooit inlaat met de eerder gevestigde orde ze beantwoorden de vraag zelf wat er van mij moet worden zoniet vandaag dan zeker wel morgen dat ik me laat omringen door gefinancierde zorgen ze kennen mijn naam, weten wat er op rekening staat wat er inkomt van wie en hoeveel daarvan er uitgaat ze willen weten in welke kasten al mijn lijken zitten met welke reden ik instituten en organisaties ontloop waarom ik de mouwen niet voor andermans talenten opstroop en of ik verschil maak tussen zwarte, rooie, gele, blauwe en witte ze hebben me in de smiezen willen me beheren, laten delen en kiezen zeten me in kwader daglicht dan ik verdragen kan ik zit klem in hun met angst en beven gemanipuleerde toestand ik probeer hier een belachelijk ingewikkeld complex op te bouwen, renoveren, slopen en weer verbouwen terwijl ik al een hele poos niemand meer kan vertrouwen ze sneupen in mijn container en de containerzakken en in mijn fysieke alsook de digitale postvakken ze rommelen wat aan in mijn marge turen 's avonds door de naden van de vitrage luisteren naar mijn zinnen op zoek naar rede voor beklag en dat alleen maar omdat ik nooit om hun barslechte grappen lach...