My experiences with a meal kit service.

This winter, I spent some time with my friends Jan and Tiff in their Arizona home. I’ve known them since 2013 when I swapped my old golf cart for a towable helicopter landing platform. Back then, they owned a helicopter flight school in Mesa AZ. I got to be good friends with them and their partner, Woody. In those days, Jan and Woody were airline pilots for America West, which was eventually gobbled up and merged into US Air. Now they’re both retired and still living in Arizona. They sold the flight school a few years ago.

Enter Tovala

Anyway, neither Jan or Tiff cook so they basically eat out or order in all the time. I’ve become used to it when I visit with them and often pick up the tab (when I’m fast enough) when we eat out. But this time was a little different. I noticed that they had a fancy toaster oven on their countertop. Long story short: they’d signed up for a meal kit program and the oven had come with it.

The program is called Tovala and it’s absolutely perfect for anyone who can’t cook or simply doesn’t want to cook. You sign up and get the oven, which is a smart device (more on that in a moment). You commit to a certain number of meals per week — the minimum is 4 — and they come once a week in an insulated box full of little meal boxes, often with meat or fish in a vacuum-sealed pouch. Everything is fresh and the quality seems to be good. At mealtime, you open a little box, follow the instructions on the card to put meal components into aluminum foil trays, pop the trays in the oven, scan a QR code on the card, and push the oven’s start button. It’s automatically programmed to cook the meal for you, usually in oven mode. (The oven can also toast, broil, and air fry.) When it’s done, you plate it up, add provided sauces and/or toppings, and eat it.

Here’s an unboxed Tovala meal. Everything comes in the tan box. Take the plastic off the trays, put them in the oven, scan the code, and the oven cooks it. Some meals do require a bit of assembly before cooking, but it’s all so easy a 5 year old could do it.

It’s absolutely idiot-proof, making it possible for someone who can’t cook to get a hot meal at home without ordering out. This is perfect for Jan and Tiff, mostly because Tovala meals tend to be healthier than restaurant or takeout food. (More on that in a moment, too.)

Worth a Try

I’m the opposite of Jan and Tiff when it comes to meals. I know how to cook and I can do it pretty well when I want to. I actually like to cook — sometimes. But I also like to have a wide variety of food and don’t necessarily want to track down recipes, shop for ingredients, and then make a whole recipe for my one-person household. Yes, I do it once in a while and I normally eat leftovers the next day and then vacuum seal and freeze additional portions. But I also have a busy life and cooking can become a chore. So I eat a lot of what I’ve put in the freezer or make meals of almond butter or avocado on crackers, or ramen with veggies, or even store bought or frozen prepared foods. It’s just not good for me in so many ways.

I thought Tovala might give me the variety I crave without the effort of making it myself or the cost/bother of going out to eat. (Understand that I live 10 miles from town and no one delivers up here.) I did the math and the price wasn’t outrageous. 4 meals a week cost about $65, which is $16-$17 per meal. I’d spend at least that if I went out, and I’d still have at least 20 miles of driving to get into town and back.

And yes, I know I can eat a lot cheaper with groceries. I’m not an idiot. I can and often do prepare a good balanced meal based around a normal meat or fish protein for under $10. But I considered this a treat and, if I could, I’d just get two or three meals a week from Tovala.

Observations

I’ve had four weeks of deliveries so far.

The first week was pretty much a loss; the food arrived on Friday and by Saturday morning I was on my way to Florida for a boat captain gig for a week. I left the food for my housesitter who was not impressed.

The second and third weeks were pretty good. Everything cooked pretty well with just a scan and the touch of a button and the vegetable or pasta combinations were good. The beef dishes were very good, which surprised me. I quickly discovered that the chicken and fish cook better than the pork, which dries out. The side salads were a sad little joke, barely more than garnish with dressing.

But, in general, the portions were good and the food was definitely fresh. I could always eat more — but then again, if I like something enough, I could probably eat it until I exploded.

I liked the flavors, which is why I’d signed up. So in that sense, I was satisfied.

But Is it Really a Good Match for Me?

Unfortunately, I came back from Florida realizing that I needed more calorie-conscious meals. (Yes, while I was traveling this winter, I porked up, as usual, and needed to start dieting again to feel more fit.) And what I was facing from Tovala were extremely tasty but not very diet-friendly food.

You see, you need to order (or skip) your meals at least 10 days before you actually get them. For example, the meals I’ll get on Friday, March 27 have to be finalized by Wednesday, March 18. So because I’d ordered tasty comfort food before going on my trip, I faced two weeks of that instead of more calorie conscious choices.

And I’ll be frank: their idea of “calorie smart” is not the same as mine. I expect a lower calorie meal to come in at less than 500 calories, preferably less than 400. (And yes, it’s doable. I made grilled salmon with a salad the other day with a total calorie count of just 170.) I think they’d have to lean heavily on their puny salads to make that happen. I’m capable of grilling or baking a protein with a handful of power greens, some tomatoes, and a tablespoon of dressing, so I don’t need something like that delivered. (Maybe someone who can’t cook or simply doesn’t have time to cook or shop might feel differently. Think Jan and Tiff.)

Of course, once I started tracking calories, I started looking very closely at the nutritional information for the Tovala meals I was eating. Calories were important, but so was sodium and added sugars. And what I was learning was that some Tovala meals were definitely fine-tuned for flavor instead of nutrition. I know that adding a lot of salt and sugar is a restaurant/catering ploy to make their food taste better, but in my mind, a savory entree should have zero added sugar. And come on folks! Stop with the salt. It’s easy to add salt but impossible to remove it.

Going back to the 10 days advance notice, however, this has proved difficult for me, as my calendar is always in flux. Last month’s last minute captain gig is just one example: I got the call on Friday and was on a plane Saturday afternoon. One of the things I like most about my life is its spontaneity — I can decide at any time what I want to do and when I want to do it. Having to lock down whether I get meals 10 days before they arrive means that if I change my plans, I need to either take the meals with me (which is only possible when I have a way to store and cook them) or find someone else to take them for me. That just adds another thing to think about when I make or change plans.

AI Support

I had ordered an egg rolls add-on for one of my meals (before I knew I really wanted to watch my calories) and tried to remove it. I couldn’t figure out how. Neither the app nor the website made it possible to remove just an add-on item. (In hindsight, I suspect I could have removed that entire meal and maybe the add-on would have gone with it. Then I could have re-added the meal. That might have worked.)

I tried technical support chat in the app and my highly specific request was handled by an AI that provided me with links to options that did not apply. When I said I wanted to chat with a person, I was told to enter my email and message. I did. No person joined the chat, but I did get an email response — from an AI. This included instructions to remove the add-on that simply did not work. I tried chat again, told it I wanted a human, and waited. Within about 4 minutes, a human joined the chat. Based on the subsequent chat, I am 98% sure she was human. She resolved the problem by finding the item and removing it for me.

But the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. (No pun intended.) A problem that I struggled with over the course of more than 40 minutes with a ton of frustration could have been quickly resolved if a human had answered the chat in the first place.

I cannot tell you how much I hate dealing with AI systems for technical support or customer service. 90% of the time, these systems cannot resolve my problem. All they do is tell me that the company I’m dealing with cares so little about their customers that they won’t even hire a sufficient human support staff. Instead, my needs are handled by a fucking machine that can’t even get things right.

And if you try to tell me in comments that “this is the future,” let me respond right now: only if you let it. I won’t. Don’t we deserve better when we are paying for a product or service? I know I do. Stop following the rest the herd and say no to AI.

Not For Me

So after four weeks of Tovala meals — two of which are still in my refrigerator — I have decided that Tovala is not for me. Between my fluctuating schedule, my need for more calorie conscious meal choices (that do not rely on a salad I can make better myself), and my absolute hatred of AI-based support, I don’t think I can continue using Tovala on a regular basis. That might change when I get my weight down to where it needs to be or spend more time at home, but for now, no.

Don’t get me wrong. If you’re like Jan and Tiff, can’t be bothered cooking, and are tired of the bother and expense of eating out or ordering in, Tovala might be perfect for you. (If you want to try it, here’s a referral code that’ll get you a free oven.) The food is good and fresh and the meal choices are interesting. And it seriously can’t be any easier to prepare your food.

But I will be getting two more weeks of Tovala food. You see, when you sign up and get the oven for free or at a discount, you agree to buy 6 weeks of meals within 6 months. I have two weeks to go. They’ll likely be in late May because my schedule for April is filling up very quickly. I don’t mind — again, I like the food. And, to be honest, I probably won’t cancel the service entirely. But I’m not sure when I’ll feel comfortable ordering food 10 days in advance.

Some thoughts on a recently read book — and “AI” in general.

I just “read” The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M Bender and Alex Hanna. I put “read” in quotes because I got it from the library as an audiobook and listened to it as I was making my long annual drive south. It wasn’t a long book — just 8 hours in audio format — and there was some repetition, but it was a good read. I highly recommend it, especially if you believe that true artificial intelligence currently exists and it is making our world better. (Spoiler alert: real AI doesn’t currently exist — at least not at the average user level — and what is being pushed as AI is failing miserably at making most things better.)

The authors take great pains to explain that what a lot of what’s being sold as artificial intelligence (AI) is nothing more than a generative large language model (LLM). Their explanation of exactly what an LLM is and how it works is thorough, clear, and easy to understand. Generative LLMs are designed to create text that seems like it could be right. They don’t think or reason and they’re just as likely to make things up as they are to pull facts from a reliable reference. They just string words together. There’s nothing intelligent about them.

They also talk about the history of machine learning, which is what AI proponents are trying to say today’s AI is:

There are applications of machine learning that are well scoped, well tested, and involve appropriate training data such that they deserve their place among the tools we use on a regular basis. These include such everyday things as spell-checkers (no longer simple dictionary look-ups, but able to flag real words used incorrectly) and other more specialized technologies like image processing used by radiologists to determine which parts of a scan or X-ray require the most scrutiny.

But in the cacophony of marketing and startup pitches, these sensible use cases are swamped by promises of machines that can effectively do magic, leading users to rely on them for information, decision-making, or cost savings—often to their detriment or to the detriment of others.

That’s the AI con of the title — AI “boosters” are trying to sell today’s AI as something it is not.

The authors refer to generative AI as “synthetic media machines” and remind readers that these systems are trained on mostly copyrighted text and images, usually accessed without the permission of the copyright holders or creators. Responding to user prompts, they basically regurgitate source content to create new versions of it. With the right prompts, however, they can be made to spit out exact copies of the source material, thus removing any “fair use” argument the promoters of these systems might try to use to defend their outright theft of material.

As I read through the book, I felt as if they were preaching to the choir. My feelings about AI are pretty much identical to theirs. I’m seeing the reality of what it is, what it can do, and what it can’t do. I’m perpetually annoyed by the spread of AI slop and the way the general public seems so willing to accept it — if not generate it. The hype — and the fact that investors and politicians are buying into it to the detriment of our world — enrages me.

The book has the following chapters, each of which are full of sometimes horrifying examples:

Chapter 1: An Introduction to AI Hype
Chapter 2: It’s Alive! The Hype of Thinking Machines
Chapter 3: Leisure for Me, Gig Work for Thee: AI Hype at Work
Chapter 4: If it Quacks Like a Doc: AI Hype and Social Services
Chapter 5: Artifice of Intelligence? AI Hype in Art, Journalism, and Science
Chapter 6: I’m Sorry, Dave, I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That: AI Doomers, AI Boosters, and Why None of That Makes Sense
Chapter 7: Do You Believe in Hope after Hype?

Again, I recommend the book. If you already feel as I do about AI, you’ll likely come away with more examples of why we should be outraged about its hype. If you, for some reason, have fallen for the hype, it will educate you about the reality of the situation. The only people really benefiting from today’s version of AI are the boosters stuffing their pockets with investor money.

An update to my October 13, 2025 blog post about the Claude AI system summarizing the transcript of a video I really liked.

I’ve been thinking about the 30 Habits video I shared earlier this month a lot. Maybe too much.

First of all, I really do like the 30 “habits” listed in the video. Maybe not all of them, but most of them. I really think they are good things to make part of your life. (If you haven’t watched the video and are looking for little things to make your life better, please take less than 20 minutes of your day and watch it.)

I decided that in order to make them part of my life I needed to be reminded of them. The idea was to make myself a little cheat sheet that I could put in my daily planner and look at once in a while. No one can expect me (or anyone else) to remember all 30 things on the list.

So I went back to the Claude summary and used it as the basis for my cheat sheet. The initial design would be bullet points. But I quickly realized that for some of the items, a bullet point would not be enough. For example, what does “small trust deposits” mean? Clearly, I needed more info on my cheat sheet.

I changed the design to a folding insert with the bullet list on the cover and the details inside and finishing up on the back. And rather than rewrite the summary myself, I just copied and pasted the Claude AI summary. I edited it a bit for length and clarity — honestly, it didn’t need much in the way of changes — and applied a font size that would make it fit while retaining legibility. After a little formatting, it was finished. I printed it, laminated it, and inserted it into my Traveler’s Notebook style planner. (The planner, by the way, has gotten yet another upgrade since Part 3 of that series and I may blog about it briefly.)

This is exactly what I needed to keep these 30 Habits front and center — or at least within arm’s reach — in my life.

This has changed my view of AI — at least a little. Clearly MDY’s use of Claude has a lot of merit — maybe even more than I originally admitted. (I have since messaged her on Mastodon and told her this.) While she used it to summarize the video’s transcript and used the summary as a decision-making tool for watching it, I can see it as a way to summarize something I’ve already watched that means a lot to me. Yes, I’m talking about letting it take notes for me.

I’m wondering if it always does such a good job or if this was a fluke. I’m also wondering whether Claude is better at it than its competitors.

But I’m not wondering enough to actually try it for myself. At least not yet. I don’t want to support AI and I believe that using it is supporting it. I really do want to think for myself, to keep my own summarization skills. And I sincerely hope that folks who have not built those skills yet try to do so without leaning on AI.

And there’s another 500 words for you. ;-)

I’m impressed by a 15-minute you tube video and surprised by how the Claude AI/LLM summarized it.

I’ll try to keep this short. Let’s see how I do.

As some people know, I often watch boring YouTube videos on my iPad in the middle of the night to help me sleep. The other morning — probably too late to get back to sleep anyway — this one was suggested to me. I tapped it and was soon pulled in by the concise way the creator presented 30 excellent tips in about 15 minutes.

If you’ve got 15 minutes to spare and think your life could use some improvement, I highly recommend watching this. (If you don’t think your life can use some improvement, you’re only fooling yourself; we can all improve.)

Now if you were expecting some talking head with a big microphone in front of his face and lots of letters after his/her name to read off a teleprompter while mostly unrelated stock footage appears randomly in the background, you will be disappointed. Or, in my case, pleased — I hate those kinds of videos.

This video has some simple graphics to look at while listening, but it doesn’t need to be seen. You can just listen. Or you can do what my Mastodon friend MDY did: feed the transcript to Claude AI and let it summarize it. She shared the link on Mastodon, too: https://claude.ai/public/ artifacts/d5ad56a1-46fe-47ab-9fc7-5f3958dd1b08.

I clicked the link and was immediately impressed (and a little surprised) by the well-organized summary that appeared. I was impressed because, on first glance (and subsequent analysis), it appears to be both accurate and correct — something I’m not accustomed to seeing with AI results. That’s why I was surprised.

Now I’m no fan of AI systems. Not only are they failing miserably most times they’re used to take a human out of a process, but they have huge environmental impacts, sucking power and water that is already costly to produce or downright stupid to waste. I have read more than my fair share of AI horror stories, from lawyers idiotically trusting them to write briefs (that clients are paying hundreds of dollars per hour for a legal processional to write) to programmers spending more time fixing AI-generated code than writing it from scratch.

But at the very top of my list of reasons to hate AI systems is the simple fact that they are being developed and promoted as a way to cut labor costs — yes, the primary purpose is to add to worldwide unemployment.

During our subsequent discussion on Mastodon, MDY made a good argument for using an AI like Claude to summarize video. She uses it to summarize content in seconds and then uses that summary to decide whether it’s worth watching the video (or one can assume, reading the article). I have to agree that if the content is long and the summary is concise, AI can save someone a lot of time, enabling them to focus on details in the content they find most valuable.

I do wonder how much time was saved in this example, though; the summary was more than 1600 words.

I also worry about people leaning on AI for tasks like this and losing the ability to create summaries for themselves. I compared an AI summary to the book reports we were required to write in school. What happens if we all just use AI for tasks like this and are then put into a position where we have to do it for ourselves?

I compare the potential loss of this skill to my own loss of spelling capabilities. I used to be a good speller. Really! But that skill is slipping away. I find myself more and more dependent on my computer or mobile device to flag or correct spelling on the fly. Sometimes, rather than look up or make an educated guess at the spelling of a word, I’ll type in something close and let my computer tell me the word I want. I’m not happy about this, but not motivated to turn off spelling check and tackle spelling on my own.

(For the record, I don’t and won’t use a grammar checker. For Pete’s sake, I am a writer. If I can’t get grammar and related style issues correct, I shouldn’t be writing at all.)

And has anyone ever considered the motivations of AI developers to get us addicted to using their systems for things we should be able to do on our own? Do you think the free systems will be free forever?

I guess my thoughts can be summarized as follows:

• This video (and yes, the AI summary) is chock full of useful tips that can make your life better. Seriously, if you haven’t watched it yet or read the summary, why the hell not?
• Yes, there are things an AI can do for you to make your life easier. But I still don’t think that includes creating original content that requires thought and creativity.
• AI should not be replacing people in jobs. Related: A person’s job should not be to check and correct “original” content created by AI.
• People should avoid technologies that do the thinking for them. “Use it or lose it” applies to your brain, too.

I don’t know about you, but I like to think for myself. While I can see the utility of the Claude summary MDY shared, I won’t be playing with AIs to summarize content for me any time soon. I’d rather do it the old fashioned way: by paying attention to what’s in front of me and, when appropriate, taking my own notes for future reference.

And look at that! I kept it under 1,000 words!

I file my claim in the Anthropic copyright case — and sit back to wait for the results.

I wrote about the Anthropic copyright case in three blog posts here, so I’m not going to go into the details again. If you want to get up to speed on my thoughts, read these:

• Fighting Against AI Copyright Theft
• Is Any Book Really Dead These Days?
• Copyright Basics

My Claim

The case went back and forth and it seemed for a while that the $3,000 per title settlement was not going to be accepted. But then it was and recently the legal team handling the claims for copyright holders including authors like me published the definitive list of infringed works. I used the lookup feature and found nine of my books.

Of the nine, two were registered under the name of the publisher, McGraw-Hill. The rest were registered under my name.

I clicked the link to file a claim, which is required if I expect any compensation for their theft of my work. The form was time consuming to complete — it took me nearly an hour to add all nine titles. And yes, I added all nine because maybe there is a chance that I’ll get some of the proceeds for titles not registered with me as the actual copyright holder.

Theoretically, I should be entitled to $21K to $27K of compensation. I’m not sure if the lawyers’ fees come out before or after this payment. For all I know, I might only get $100/title. But I also know that I won’t get anything if I don’t submit a claim.

I’ve done my part; now I have to wait and see.

Further Thoughts

My thoughts on this matter are pretty straightforward. No person or organization should be allowed to access and use copyrighted work without going through legal channels to do so. Anthropic committed piracy; that’s accepted and is the reason they’re paying up. But did they get permission to use the works to train an AI system? Clearly, they did not. That’s the real reason they should be paying.

I’m in a weird situation. In my mind, these books were dead. They cover topics that are no longer current and have very little (if any) value. I never expected to see another dime in compensation for writing them. So this is all icing on a cake I’ve already eaten. I’ll take it!

But what of the people whose work still has legitimate current value? Or of future books I might write that don’t go out of print in 2 years? How often will our work be used without our permission to train systems designed to replace us?

I’ve got a real problem with that — and you should, too.

Good news and bad news about that copyright lawsuit I’m part of.

Since writing a post last month about my participation in the huge copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, there have been a few developments.

The Good News

First, a settlement was reached between the plaintiffs and Anthropic. A big settlement: $1.5 billion to be paid to affected authors. This came out to $3,000 per infringed work. Whoa.

To qualify, the work needed to not only be on the list I mentioned and searched for that post, but registered with the Copyright Office. If you recall, I had 16 titles on the list. I hurried over to the US Copyright Public Records System and did a search for my name. I came up with a list of 91 records, more than half of which were for my books. I was very pleased to see that Peachpit Press registered my titles in my name, although McGraw-Hill, Sybex, and O’Reilly did not. Still, at least 10 of the titles on the first list were registered in my name. (I did not bother to cross-reference the two lists, although I might do so later.)

So it looked to me as if I might be able to pull in at least $30,000 on this case.

Holy crap.

I’ve been part of class actions before and I think the most I’ve ever gotten was about $130, which was for an Apple keyboard issue I barely remembered. But this — well, this was real money.

The Bad News

Just when I was starting to think of how I would spend this little windfall, the bad news broke: The judge overseeing the Anthropic case rejected the settlement.

Alsup [the judge] expressed grave concerns that lawyers rushed the deal, which he said now risks being shoved “down the throat of authors,” Bloomberg Law reported.

Well, this is something I don’t mind being shoved down my throat.

Look at it from my point of view: I wrote how-to books about using computers. The vast majority of them had a “shelf life” of less than a year. That means royalty income for each title lasted about a year — if the book even earned out. I had to keep writing them to keep earning a living. That’s why I wrote more than 80 of them between 1991 and 2012.

To me — and probably everyone other than a greedy and mindless AI consumer — these books were dead. No one was buying them — heck, I assume all inventories were destroyed. I could not expect any more income from them. In most cases, I couldn’t even use part of them as the basis for an updated book about the same topic. Some of the software I wrote about doesn’t even exist anymore.

The thought of earning $3,000 per title on these dead books is pretty appealing. Knowing that Anthropic isn’t the only AI copyright infringer out there and that its settlement could be the first of many that benefit me is even more appealing.

But the judge put the brakes on the deal and threw everything back to the parties.

As you can imagine, I’ll try to stay involved in this process to make sure I’m on any list out there. I just hope it doesn’t drag on too long.

And a lesson to writers…

Intellectual property is a real thing that deserves protection. It is the fruit of your labor. Whether your book sells three copies or a million, it has real value. And who knows? It could end up on a list that earns you $3,000 (or more) when AI companies are brought to court.

Register your copyrights. Go to the Registration Portal on the US Copyright website and follow the links and instructions to register all of your work. Yes, it’s copyrighted without registration, but it’s only really protected when it’s registered.

I join the class action suit against Anthropic for the use of text in 16 of my books to train their AI without permission or compensation.

I didn’t expect to spend part of my morning filling in a form on a lawyer’s website to provide information about myself and the books Anthropic apparently used to train their AI. After all, I haven’t written much in the past 10 years and all of what I’d written before then was about using computers. Surely all of those books were so sorely out of date that even an AI wouldn’t be interested in them.

But here I am.

I’d heard about the lawsuit:

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC is a class action lawsuit under the Copyright Act brought by authors on behalf of copyright holders against Anthropic PBC, an AI company. The Class of copyright holders — consisting of authors and publishers – claims that Anthropic took books from pirate websites Library Genesis (“LibGen”) and Pirate Library Mirror (“PiLiMi”) without authorization.

The Court recently certified a LibGen & PiLiMi Pirated Books Class made up of all legal or beneficial owners of the exclusive right to reproduce any ISBN- or ASIN-bearing book that Anthropic copied from the two pirate sites. The Class’s claims are scheduled for trial on December 1, 2025.

The latest update to that is that the parties have apparently settled and money will be paid out to the 7 million authors affected by the theft. You can read about that in an article on Ars Technica.

I knew that the lawyers were looking for affected authors but didn’t do anything about it because I didn’t think I was an affected author. (See above.) But then Dave Mark on Mastodon posted a toot with a link to an Australian Website that had a link to an Atlantic website page with a tool for searching which books were used to train the AI. And yes, 16 of my books (plus some repetitions) were on it.

So I tracked down the article about it on the Author’s Guild website and clicked the big button to provide my contact information. That put me on the lawyers’ website where I could provide my contact info and list all 16 titles.

I’m done now and can get on with my day. I don’t expect to get much from this, but I do think it’s important that authors stand up for their rights — especially when money- and resource-hogging for-profit organizations are stealing our work to build systems to replace us.

If you’ve written any books in the past 20 years, I urge you to see if you’re on the list and take action if you are. Theft of our work has to stop. Let’s work together to protect our work and our livelihoods.

I experience a grueling travel day thanks to automated systems and basic ineptitude at American Airlines.

I’ll try to make this short, mostly because I’m exhausted and don’t want to spend too much time writing about it. But it was such a crazy experience that I want to record it for posterity.

The Backstory

I just finished a two week delivery/training boat captain gig in Florida. The owner of the boat, a 2024 Beneteau Antares 11, needed to move the boat from Niceville on the Florida panhandle to Jacksonville on the northeastern Florida coast, a distance of more than 800 nautical miles. John had zero boating experience and his insurance company required an experienced training captain on board. John found me through my YouTube Great Loop videos. We had 2 weeks to do the trip and we managed with a day to spare.

There’s a lot more to this story, but I’ll cover the highlights in my Great Loop blog. All I can say is that I don’t know how people can live with the heat and humidity in Florida in August.

The Flights, as Planned and Changed

My flights home were yesterday, August 13. I wasn’t sure if we’d get back in time for an early flight, so I booked one departing Jacksonville at 4:47 PM. The plan was Jacksonville to Charlotte, Charlotte to Seattle, and Seattle to Wenatchee. Three flights. American Airlines for the first two and Alaska Air/Horizon for the last. I’d get in at 11:59 PM and my truck was parked in the long term lot.

Unfortunately, John had appointments that afternoon so he had to drop me off at the airport at 11 AM. No big deal. I can wait at airports.

I checked the weather and discovered that afternoon t-storms were forecasted right around the time of departure. So I went to the gate where an earlier flight to Charlotte was boarding. Another flight would leave two hours later. I meekly asked if it were possible to get on an earlier flight since t-storms were forecasted. To my amazement, the gate agent gave me a boarding pass for a middle seat on the flight that was boarding. He also gave me a standby receipt for an earlier flight to Seattle from Charlotte.

I hopped on the flight. My seat was in one of the forward “premium” rows so there was legroom and being in the middle wasn’t horrible. 90 minutes later, I was in Charlotte.

In Charlotte

The flight I was on standby for would board shortly. I decided that I didn’t want a middle seat — which I knew I’d get on standby — for a 4 1/2 hour flight. So I went to the gate and gave up my standby spot. I’d be on the 7:23 PM flight from Charlotte to Seattle as originally planned.

I had four hours to kill in Charlotte. I started by having lunch at a decent sit-down seafood place. Charlotte’s airport is very large — maybe larger than SeaTac? — and there were plenty of dining options. And shops, although none of them really interested me.

After lunch, I wandered over to the main atrium area and took a seat in a rocker.

It was around then that I checked the American Airlines app. It still showed me departing Jacksonville at 4:47. That was odd. It was as if American didn’t know I was already in Charlotte. I decided to make sure that my boarding pass on the next leg was still valid. I went to the customer service desk, which wasn’t busy at all. The guy there was friendly and helpful and even upgraded my seat to an exit row at no extra charge.

I walked over to the gate my Seattle flight would leave from. I did a crossword puzzle and got a fresh made Cinnabon with half the icing.

American Proves It’s Clueless

My phone started pinging with reminders to board the Jacksonville flight. The app showed I was still booked on it, but my seat on the Seattle fight was still there.

A while later, my phone pinged with a fight delay notification. Weather had moved into Jacksonville, just as I thought it might. My flight out of there was delayed. Good thing I’d gotten an earlier flight out!

And then the app’s notifications informed me that because I’d no longer make my connection in Charlotte to Seattle, they’d rebooked my flight — to LAX! They basically rescheduled all of my flights so I’d be going from Charlotte to Los Angeles that day, overnight in Los Angeles, and then take flights the next morning to Seattle and Wenatchee. That would get me home at 2 PM the next day!

WTF?

I went back to the customer service desk. By now, a few east coast planes had been delayed — there were apparently T-storms up and down the coast, although not at Charlotte. There was a line. I waited on it. I got the same customer service guy and he remembered me. He looked up my flight info and, sure enough, my reservations had been changed.

He restored my flight out of Charlotte and even managed to get me the same seat.

On my way back to the gate, I called Alaska Air to make sure I could still get on the flight to Wenatchee that night. I was halfway back when the agent told me that they couldn’t change it because it was booked through American. So I doubled back to the customer service desk. The line was long now, but I didn’t wait on it. Instead, I waited near the guy who’d helped me twice. When he was finished with the guy he was helping, I told him what I needed. He checked the reservation and found that the fix he’d made for me was undone and I was booked on a later flight to LAX again.

He fixed it again, this time with notes on my record. I lost my exit row seat but wound up closer to the front in another window seat. I had boarding passes for both flights.

To Seattle

I went back to the gate. They had started boarding. I came up to the gate before my group was called and the bitchy gate agent told me to put my carry on bag in the box they use to check bag sizes. No one’s bag ever fits in that damn thing and mine didn’t either. She forced me to check it. I think she was trying to punish me, but it turned out to be a good thing she did. I pulled my laptop and journal out of the bag, put them in a tote I had, and left the bag at the gate.

I got on the plane. I had an unpleasant flight from Charlotte to Seattle. Did you know that American Airlines doesn’t offer food on 4 1/2 hour flights? It’s a good thing I had a big lunch.

The only good thing about the flight was the sunset that lasted about two hours.

I Become the Woman Running to Catch a Plane at the Airport

Although the plane left a little late, it arrived a little early. That was a good thing because I only had an hour until my next flight.

But then we sat on the taxiway between two active runways for 40 minutes. When we finally got to the gate, the flight attendants told the passengers that there were 9 of us with very close connections. This made it possible for me, in row 14, to get off the plane very quickly. I was at the farthest Terminal D gate and needed to get to the farthest Terminal C gate. Not having that checked bag to drag along with me made it possible for me to run — yes, run! — for part of the way to my other gate. (I think I would have dropped dead running if I’d tried to run the whole way.) I was just entering Terminal C when they announced a 2-minute warning for closing the doors to my flight. I ran into the area waiving my boarding pass and yelling “Wenatchee, Wenatchee!” I wasn’t even sure where to go. The gate agent waved me over and let me through the gate. I made my way down to the tarmac and up the ramp. I got on the plane. I wound up sitting in the wrong seat, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to get home.

A Happy Ending … and Lesson Learned

The plan landed early, at 11:49 PM. (It’s a short flight.) Of course, my checked luggage was not on it. I would have been very surprised if it was. That required me to work with the Wenatchee staff to get my bag located and scheduled for delivery. It arrived at my house at 4 PM today.

It’s pretty clear to me that America West, the airline I flew many times to and from Phoenix when I lived in Arizona, did not survive the merger with US Air and American Airlines. I hope I never have to fly American again.

Enshittification forces me to sever my 30+ year relationship with Microsoft Office products.

I cancelled my Office 365 subscription today.

I didn’t think I’d ever drop Word and Excel. After all, I know these two applications better than any other on my computer.

These apps made it possible for me to leave my last full-time job, in 1990, to start a career as a freelance writer and computer consultant. One of my first gigs as a freelancer was teaching Word and Excel — and Lotus 123; remember that? — in classes of up to 8 people for a computer training organization and its clients. I wrote three Microsoft Word courses for them.

The first book I wrote for Peachpit Press, way back in the 1995, was the Macintosh Bible Guide to Word 6; I also wrote Excel 5 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide and the Macintosh Bible Guide to Excel 5 the same year. I followed that up the next year with my first Windows book, Excel for Windows 95: Visual QuickStart Guide. Over the years, I wrote a total of 22 books for Peachpit about either Word or Excel and even managed to write one about Outlook for Microsoft Press, even though I only used it for about a year or two for my own personal email needs. More recently, I self-published a little book that explains exactly how to sort data in Excel; it still sells more than 10 years after publication.

My first training video was about Microsoft Word for macProVIdeo back in August 2006. (What a great trip to Vancouver for that job!) I then went on to author another four Office-related courses for Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) between 2009 and 2014.

When I needed to keep track of hours flown and maintenance due for my helicopter, I did it in Excel. I also used Excel to keep track of mileage and stops on my Great Loop trip. In fact, I’m likely to use Excel more than anyone you know who doesn’t have a job requiring them to use it.

And Word! Hell, it’s a word processor and I’m a writer. I wrote dozens of my books in Word. I’d even fire up to write a quick note.

But my mutually beneficial relationship with Microsoft Office has changed.

It started when they made Office subscriber-only, forcing users to pay an annual fee with promises of regular upgrades. What they didn’t mention was that Office apps would start to “phone home,” to make sure they were installed on a computer owned by a user with a valid subscription. Failure to access the Internet when it needed to do one of these checks resulted in problems. It became unreliable as a tool when I traveled with my laptop. Who knew when it would force me to log into the home server?

And, more recently, they added AI features that can scan your documents to “help you create, communicate, and collaborate more efficiently.” Pardon me, but bull-fucking-shit. The last thing in the world that I need is an application that’s sending the text of every single thing I write to a faceless server in a data center somewhere. How long before one of my phrases or descriptions appears in some generative AI text based on the prompt of a stranger 6,000 miles away? And who else has access to this info?

Of course, turning this off means tracking down the settings to do so, which are buried behind a button labeled with the benign phrase Connected Experiences inside the Privacy preferences. (That should say something to you.) Click that button to find settings in an all-or-none setup. You can’t turn on the second check box to download templates and access online help unless you turn on the Turn on all connected experiences check box. And, of course, that first check box admits that it will send your content to someone or something somewhere.

It was the inability to access Help from within the app with this crap turned off that really started to bug me. But do you want to know what the last straw was?

The message that appears in my blank Word documents, before I’ve had a chance to type a single character, a message suggesting that I use the Copilot AI to draft my document.

This is what Word looks l like now each time I open it. I disabled the AutoUpdater it put into my System settings, as well as another autolaunch app that apparently checks my subscription on their website every time I launch an Office app. How else would it know, only 15 minutes after the fact, that my subscription was cancelled? The only way to get rid of that dialog box is to force quit it.

And we thought Clippy was bad.

I am a fucking writer. I wrote for a living — and still do get paid to do so (although not as often as I’d like) — for more than 20 years. I do not need a fucking AI assistant to help me draft a document or even to check my GD grammar. I want these features turned off with absolutely no clue left behind to hint that they even exist.

And I want to access onscreen Help when I need it, right from within the document. How about like it was in the old days, when you actually got help files installed with the app instead of a menu command dumping you into a forum where someone might or might not have the answer to your question?

And when I contact help and choose the chat option because I’m not likely to understand the heavily accented script-reading voice of the overseas-based support team, if it says the average wait is 2 minutes, I don’t expect to wait 16 minutes. You’re running a GD computer. It can’t calculate average wait times? Bad enough I wound up spending 54 minutes of my day trying to get a solution. Yes, I timed it!

And I don’t want my computer connecting to the Internet every fucking time I launch one of your apps. If I subscribed last March and the app checked in then, it should not need to check in again until this March. And I certainly don’t want it sending the contents of my documents to your server to play with in ways only vaguely discussed in your 50-page, lawyer composed terms of service.

I want a work processor and a spreadsheet app. I don’t want an assistant or content thief.

When I finished with the chat, I had a solution alright. My solution was to cancel my Office 365 subscription, which was due to renew next week. I then went directly to the web site for Libre Office and downloaded it. After 30+ years as a Word user and “expert” — I think authoring 24 books and 6 video courses about Office products establishes that — I’m switching to a different word processor. I hope it’s as good as everyone says.

And if it decides to start phoning home, I’ll be writing in TextEdit.