Famous Deli Potato Salad Pregnancy
A Reminder About the Dangers of Letting Someone or Something Think for You
My wife wanted me to make New York deli-style potato salad, at home. I’m a good cook, but I have never been able to master any potato salad let alone that of a famous New York delicatessen.
Sitting opposite me at the kitchen island as I peeled, she said, “You lived in New York for years. You ate it all the time. What’s so hard? Doesn’t it have just four ingredients?” (She’s not a cook and doesn’t understand why the number of ingredients IS NOT relevant in determining the difficulty of a given recipe.)
It was a throw-down.
So I typed into Google: “Famous Deli Potato Salad.”
To my amazement, Google completed the search phrase with “pregnancy.” “Famous deli potato salad pregnancy.”
Apparently, there are lots of pregnant women who want to know whether they can safely eat deli potato salad. (Fair enough. Listeria has apparently been a problem, as I found out when I let Google do its googly thing.)
But something else struck me about this.
We have lots of our most intimate electronics — from phones to Fitbits — now thinking for us based on what everybody else thinks. Not what we think but what something (not even some body) thinks we should think.
I know this isn’t profound, but it is alarming, because they often get the context badly wrong.
Autocorrect is another semi-autonomous, error-prone intruder in our lives that frequently causes trouble.
I had sent an email to my boss, Stan. To my horror (and his humor) his name was autocorrected into “Satan.”
As in, “Satan, we’ll need your help holding the vendor’s feet to the fire, otherwise, we’ll have Hell to pay with our clients when the project isn’t completed on time.”
What do pregnancy and Satan have in common other than Rosemary’s Baby? Maybe not much.
But in my recent experience they are signs that…
Letting someone or something think for us is subtlety changing the way we think on our own and how behave with each other and…shocking, I know…not for the better.
Maybe it’s just rampant attention deficit disorder from too much technology distraction. Or maybe it’s the general coarsening of our encounters with each other — added friction in the air as we rush from task to task. But I’ve noticed that in more and more conversations people are completing other people’s sentences, filling in our search bars and autocorrecting us like crazy. Pay attention the next time you’re in a group and see for yourself.
Our mothers taught us not to do this, so what’s up?
It seems like we just can’t wait any longer — can’t pause for the pause.
Husbands and wives have been doing this for years. But, generally, among couples, it’s a form of intimacy and connection rather than a sign of impatience. (Though in their fifth decade of marriage my mother was often heard saying to my father, “My God, will you please just finish the damn sentence!” which she felt was more polite than doing it for him. )
Hmm?
So both because it’s impolite and impolitic, there are big dangers in making even little assumptions, while our technology is teaching us that it’s okay to do this.
Today’s search capabilities are amazing, something pointed out to me daily by the reference librarian who cut her teeth and fingers on index cards and with whom I share several iPads that double as bed warmers between us in winter.
But if Amazon Prime, with its sophisticated search algorithms and profiling tools, still can’t recommend a movie I’d actually be willing to pay extra for, how is the person finishing my thoughts in a meeting going to know what’s in my head waiting to get out?
More often than not, they won’t.
Like the technology we’ve spawned, we frequently get the context wrong and, when we do, our lives become immediately more difficult.
Plus, as linguistic researchers have found, even if we do have sufficient context, the chances are good that we’ll finish others’ sentences as we wish and not as the speaker intended.
When she finally sat down with her iPad and a nice plate of freshly made deli style potato salad, my wife said she agreed.
I could have told you she would.
But I won’t. That would be rude.
