This week, before yet another tiresome excessive seasonal snow storm dumped graced us with another foot of snow, Jim and I went to Boston’s Logan Airport to pick up our son Will and his family. They’d been on a five month trip to the Far East perhaps to escape our winter. Will, like many in his generation, can work from anywhere, so New Zealand, Indonesia and Japan were his young family’s homes for the winter. Or rather, most of the winter.
We don’t travel all that much these days unless you count trips to the compost pile, but we get to go to the airport frequently to pick up or drop off family travelers. We have always sailed into the airport, left beloveds off or picked beloveds up without any problems.
This time Jim was very focused on us parking in a cell phone lot while we waited for Will and his family. Why? I do not know. I suggested we go to the place where we always have gone in front of terminal E but no, we were going to a cell phone lot. This also seemed to require, in Jim’s estimation, turning his phone on IN OUR DRIVEWAY and listening to google maps all the way to Boston.
Will’s family’s flight was coming in shortly before 6 am so we were in the car listening to the dulcit tones of Google maps at 3:30 am. The insanity of listening to some fake voice giving us directions on roads we have driven for forty five years did not escape me, but I was co-pilot not pilot so I didn’t interrupt the google lady to express an opinion. Whatever.
Once through the Callahan tunnel and onto the airport loop road, the fun began. Or as my grandfather always said, “When you fall through the ice with your snowshoes, your trouble she’s just begun.” We knew right where terminal E and its parking lot for waiting in the car for pickup was, but apparently the google lady had a better idea. Soon we found ourselves looping on unfamiliar, outside the airport roads with the voice saying over and over to us “Make a U turn.” As the road was two lane with oncoming tractor trucks, this did not seem like a good plan. It was at this point I considered throwing Jim’s phone out the window.
Over the google woman’s voice I encouraged that person I was driving with Jim to just go to the lot across the street from terminal E as we had done for the past 45 years. After some “discussion”, we went to that parking lot and seamlessly picked up our dear beloveds. They were so tired that they probably did not notice that Jim and I looked a bit rumpled from our tiff.
We drove home without google lady and in the aftermath, it occurred to me I wanted to make the following promises.
- If you contact Green Hope Farm you will always connect with a human and never AI.
- AI will never write this blog or any other document coming from Green Hope Farm.
- All Flowers will be grown, harvested, made into and bottled as Flower Essences and shipped by humans not AI.
- Green Hope Farm will have as little to do with AI as possible.
- Photos will always be taken by a human and filters are never used.
- Next time we go to the airport, I will be driving and google lady will not be with us.