Business update: I hired an intern. His name is Alfred, but he prefers to be called Al.
After working with Al for a while, I realized that having an intern on your team tends to reduce overall productivity, because you need a senior member to guide them, which is time better spent on your own tasks.
So if having an intern is a net negative, why would anyone still want to hire one? Because they learn, they grow, and eventually their output becomes a net positive.
Now back to Al. Unlike other interns, he doesn’t learn. He can’t even remember what I told him 3 messages ago, so he stays a net negative. He’s like a Terminator with its CPU set to read-only.
I used to believe that if I kept talking to Al, he’d eventually get better at what I asked. But Al doesn’t work like that. He just wings it based on my latest messages, often making shit up. And because he has the memory of a goldfish, my earlier messages eventually get ignored too.
I never keep my conversations with Al for long, because the more we talk, the worse he performs. Very often, I’ll see Al start talking nonsense, and I think, “Oh shit, he probably misunderstood something, dug himself into a hole, and can’t get out.” Then I have to wipe his memory again.
The most frequent task I give Al is fixing the grammar of my writing. The problem is, he often gets over-eager and interprets “fixing grammar” as “rewriting”. And I hate it. I’m a lousy writer, but I want to write as myself.
So I keep telling him, “I only asked you to fix the grammar!” But it doesn’t always work. Sometimes I have to remind Al that I only care about fixing grammar: “I don’t care about clarity or flow. I don’t care about being engaging. Don’t add em dashes to my writing. This is not fucking Hemingway.”