The expression “thinking outside the box” used to trouble me.  In the field in which I worked, we were bound by an incredible number of regulations – state and federal laws, as well as a number of requirements from fire, health, food service, and other regulatory agencies.  So I spent years believing that it was more important to think creatively inside the box, rather than coming up with ideas that wouldn’t satisfy all those rules.

               Lately, I have realized that thinking outside the box means something different to other folks. For example, the picture below clearly shows someone who thinks outside the corral.  I guess it’s sufficient to get your cart pretty close, rather than actually in, the cart corral.

               Of course, there are those folks who follow the request to put carts into the corral, but I guess – as the following picture illustrates – they are thinking creatively inside the corral.  Let’s just not worry about which side to put them on, just get those puppies in those lines!

Some of the creative thinking I’ve observed of late has really puzzled me.  These folks aren’t just thinking outside the box, they simply aren’t thinking.  You decide – is the road work really over?  Or is it just beginning?

               The creative thinking that really threw me for a loop was the one that thought outside the can. Thanks to my friend and long-time reader, Betty, for sharing this photo of a soup maker who thought we needed a little more adventure and uncertainty in our lives.  Try dipping your grilled cheese in this!

               Hats off to all of you folks who keep us on our toes with your imagination and creative thinking.  But really, let’s keep the right things in the right cans, shall we?

               There’s an old horror movie from the ’60s in which a concert pianist has the hands of a killer attached to his arms (after losing his own in a car accident).  The hands take over his life and he starts killing people willy-nilly.

               Foolish you say? I’m not so sure….my hands have, on occasion, overridden my brain with disastrous (though not murderous) results.

               For example, many years ago I took a job in a city an hour’s drive away.  For three years, I drove to the end of my road in the morning and turned right onto the state highway taking me east.  Our town was to the west.  Every day I drove that route, Monday through Friday.

               It surprised but didn’t shock me when, after those three years and I took a job in a closer town, my hands steered that car eastward every morning.

               My new job would require me to continue straight on at the end of our road, crossing the state highway and proceeding south.  But several times in that first month, my hands would turn the wheel to the east, and off we’d go.  I live in the country, so finding a place to “turn around” cost me precious minutes.  Of course, I could just turn on the next road going south and weave my way through the country.  But…

               I had forgotten about this trick of my hands –overriding my brain – until last week.  I bought some special facial cleanser from my Avon lady.  I intended to use it in the shower and see if it, indeed, made my skin “feel softer and cleaner than ever before.”               

               My showering routine hasn’t changed in the past five or six decades – get wet, shampoo and lather, rinse, condition, rinse, wash body.  Shampoo, rinse, condition, rinse, wash.  Shampoo, condition, wash.  That’s it.

               I was excited to try this facial cleanser, so the first day, I hopped in the shower and immediately my hands took over my brain.  I shampooed, rinsed, conditioned, rinsed, and then remembered the facial cleanser. Oh well, I put it on and it felt very luxurious.  Almost pudding texture!  I rubbed it all over my face and noticed that it got in my hairline.  I wasn’t sure that was a great idea, as it took a while to rinse out and I vowed to use it first the next day.

               The next day, I got in the shower, got wet, shampooed, and rinsed –oh, drat!  I forgot the cleanser.  I grabbed the tube, squirted some in my hand, and applied it to….my hair!  All over my hair was this pudding-esque substance that wasn’t rinsing out well.  Naturally, I had to shampoo a second time to get it out.  I forgot the facial cleanser that time, too and just skipped it entirely.

               On the third day, I used the facial cleanser first.  It was easy.  I just spent the whole morning before my shower repeating “face first, face first,” like a mantra.

               My hands got the message, but gosh they are willful.  Leaves me wondering what they’ll do next!

Recently, I read an article that said Wendy’s (an Ohio-based fast food company) was partnering with Google to bring customers “Wendy’s FreshAI.”  This is short for “Wendy’s Fresh Artificial Intelligence.”

The first thing that struck me was the interesting oxymoron of “fresh” with “artificial.” Then I realized there were many more ramifications to this than a funny grammatical issue.  According to the article – in the Wall Street Journal, by the way, so not some fly-by-night internet site – there will be a “chatbot” (another new word combining “chat” with “robot,” I presume) that will take verbal orders for customers who line up at drive-thru windows.  The purpose, they say, is to reduce “long wait times.”

               First of all, HA!  These geniuses have clearly never called a company and tried to get a real human on the line, saying the word “representative” over and over until you want to scream, without success.  Or pressed the number for “representative” to be told, “no such number exists.”

               Secondly, these incredibly smart folks say that there will be “a restaurant team member” who will be present to monitor the chatbot.  So, if there’s going to be a human monitoring the chatbot, why doesn’t the human just take the order?  How does this speed anything up?

               The team at Google acknowledged that they have to program this chatbot for a number of extraneous factors, including (but not limited to):  knowing the lingo (“milkshake” means “frosty” and “JBC” means “junior bacon cheeseburger”), adapting to accents, ignoring people talking in the backseat – or children screaming, vehicle noises on the street, radios, construction, and passersby talking.  Oh, yes, this seems like an easy thing to do. There won’t be any problems with that!

               Finally, what about those of us who can’t hear well and depend on lip reading?  When the chatbot records our “double cheese with a side of fries” as “double fries with a side of cheese,” just how are we to correct it?  We can’t hear them repeat it, so….I’m guessing I’ll just eat what they give me?

               Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian acknowledged that these problems are some of the hardest to combat in creating this chatbot.  And – good news – if the chatbot isn’t getting it right, the customer will “have the option” of speaking with a human.

               Why are we changing this again?  To speed things up?  I’m not seeing how it’s going to speed anything up except our frustration.  Wendy’s spokespeople stressed that there is “no plan to replace existing workers with technology.”  They just want to “enhance the customer and crew experience by taking the complexity out of the ordering process so employees can focus on serving food and building relationships.”

I’m not sure that ordering fast food at a drive-thru is “complex.”  At least, it never has been for me.  But I’m not worried about job loss for humans – I bet the existing workers will be busy with their new roles as customer complaint representatives.

               A few years ago, my phone started sending me Amber Alert notifications.  This occurs when there is a missing child and so the receiver gets notified of the day and time the child went missing, as well as any other pertinent information (like “last seen in a 2009 Honda Accord”).  Since this is an important and helpful notification, I appreciated receiving them – even at 2:00 in the morning when there was little chance I was out of my bed and anywhere I might notice anything helpful.

               But then my phone got uppity.  It has decided, all on its’ own and without my support, help, or permission, to begin notifying me of other things.

               It started with notifications that it was going to install a critical update at 3:00 a.m.  First of all, these notifications come in the form of loud beeping.  So loud, you might think your home security alarm is going off.  Secondly, this particular notification is, again, not as useful as it might be should the aforementioned update be scheduled for some time when I might actually be using my phone.  Thus, I receive a startling siren-esque beep to tell me that my phone will install the update while I sleep.  The update, I might add, is never one that is even noticeable.  It changes nothing on my phone in any way, so I’m not sure exactly why it occurs and why I need a loud notification that it’s going to occur.

               Last fall, I started getting weather alerts.  This notification also includes a loud beep.  Then you have to go to your weather application and open it up.  That’s the easy part.  From there, you have to figure out where the actual notification is located.  Sometimes there’s a bar that says “last notification 2 hours ago.”  So, why, I’m wondering, am I getting this loud noise now?  By the time I find the actual notification, it usually tells me “rain expected.”  Okay, it’s May in the Midwest.  Duh.  I really didn’t need to be jolted out of my nap to be told that. 

               Today, I received a loud weather notification just to tell me it was “expected to be sunny most of the week.” Seriously, this is out of control.

               Just last week, I received not one, but two “health alerts.”  This was new to me and made my heart rate increase a bit.  Was my phone detecting a problem?  Breathing?  Heart?  I rushed to open up my phone to have it tell me “your step average has increased in the past 23 days.”  Well, geez, okay fine, I check my steps every night and I know I’m walking more, but does this really require a “health alert?”  The second one told me I had climbed more floors in the past two weeks than normal.  Again, making my pulse and breathing dramatically increase because I’m doing “better” should not be a “health alert.”

               If my phone really wants to be helpful, it should get rid of these notifications and tell me something useful.  How about a “gasoline alert” when the tank is low?  Or “milk alert” when I’m forgetting to buy milk at the grocery.  Here’s another one – “laundry alert!”  Maybe then I wouldn’t leave the load in the washer overnight, requiring a re-wash in the morning.             

               Until the phone decides to be helpful, I’m ignoring the weather alerts and just looking out the window.  It’s always 100%  accurate, anyway!