Author: Mike

Hello, my name is Mike Jackson. If you have any comments about the post you have just read I'd love to read them.
A factory worker in blue overalls sits at a production line inspecting small grey units, his expression subdued while colleagues clap in the background. In the foreground, a laminated “Employee of the Month” certificate misspells his name as “Darryn.” To one side, a screen displays pressure test results, and a red bin marked “Defective Units” holds rejected items. On the wall behind him, a sign counts down “314 Februaries left before retirement,” adding a quiet, unsettling note to the otherwise routine workplace scene.
Posted in stories

Productivity

Posted on by Mike

I have got Claude to create an agent called ‘The AI Grandad Story Agent’ which is able to write short stories for me. Here is one of them…

They gave me a certificate last Tuesday. Employee of the Month, February, laminated and everything. Karen from HR stood in the break room and started clapping, so everyone else did too, because that’s what you do when Karen starts clapping. The certificate has my name spelled wrong. Darryn instead of Darren. I didn’t like to say anything.

What I do, specifically, is remove the defective units from the line before they reach packaging. A defective unit is any unit that fails the pressure test. The machine tells me which ones fail. I remove them and place them in the red bin. Someone else deals with the red bin. I don’t know who. I’ve worked here eleven years and I don’t know what we manufacture. The units are grey. They are approximately the size of a fist. Management said knowing the end-use wasn’t relevant to my role, and I suppose they’re right.

My targets went up in January. They went up in January last year too. I asked Adrian, my line manager, whether they would go up again next January, and he said I was demonstrating a really negative attitude and that the certificate was meant to be a morale intervention. I nodded and said thank you for the certificate.

I have three hundred and fourteen Februaries left before retirement, assuming the pension age doesn’t move again. Which I am quite sure it will.

A suburban street viewed from an upstairs window, where an elderly man stands inside beside a notebook of observations on the windowsill. Across the road, a neatly kept house displays the number 42. A middle-aged couple stand at their front gate, the man adjusting his beige jacket while the woman in a blue cardigan waves directly towards the window. The scene feels orderly and quiet, with a subtle sense of unease as the couple appear to be watching the observer.
Posted in stories

The Hendersons

Posted on by Mike

The Hendersons at number forty-two have always been perfectly pleasant. That is what everyone says, and everyone is right. They wave from the driveway. They put their bins out on the correct evening. When Janet Henderson brought a casserole round after Derek’s hip operation, it was still warm, which is the detail people mention most often.

Nobody can say precisely when they noticed.

It was Pauline from number thirty-eight who first raised it at the Neighbourhood Watch meeting, though she prefaced it carefully, the way you do when you suspect you might sound foolish. She said she thought the Hendersons had been wearing the same clothes for quite some time. Not dirty. Not dishevelled. Just the same. Graham in his beige jacket and dark trousers. Janet in the blue cardigan with the small pearl buttons.

Someone said that was hardly a crime. Pauline agreed that it wasn’t. The minutes reflect that no further action was taken.

But then Derek, who has nothing better to do since the hip, and whose front bedroom window has an unobstructed view of the street, began keeping a note. Not obsessively. Just a small notebook, dates and times. Graham leaving at 8.15. Janet collecting the post. Both of them pausing at the gate on Tuesday evening to look at something in the middle distance that Derek, craning, could not identify.

Always the beige jacket. Always the blue cardigan.

He mentioned it to his daughter on the phone and she said Dad, please, you need to get out more, and he said yes, you’re right, and agreed to say no more about it.

That was eleven days ago. This morning the notebook is where he left it on the windowsill. He opens it without thinking, then stops. The last entry is in his handwriting, his pen, his shorthand for the date. But the observation it records is not one he remembers making.

8.15. They were looking at the bedroom window. They seemed satisfied.

He closes the notebook. Below, Graham Henderson pauses at the gate, adjusts his beige jacket at the collar, and looks up at Derek’s window with an expression that, at this distance, could be anything at all. Janet waves.

Derek steps back from the glass.

Written by Claude. Prompted and chosen by me.

Two office cubicles in a compliance department, one occupied with paperwork and a completed report, the other empty with a nameplate ‘K.’, suggesting a recent disappearance.
Posted in stories

The Reassignment

Posted on by Mike

I arrived at the office on Wednesday to find that K. was gone.

This was not, in itself, unusual. People left. The department had procedures for this, forms which existed precisely because such things happened, and the existence of the forms suggested that they happened with sufficient regularity to warrant them. I found this reassuring.

His desk had been cleaned. No, not cleared… cleaned, which is a different thing, though I could not have explained the difference to anyone who asked, and in any case nobody asked. I did not ask either. I sat at my own desk, which is adjacent to his, and opened my morning correspondence.

Patricia brought tea. We discussed the car park.

I have worked in Compliance for twelve years. In that time I have learned that the department functions best when its members understand the boundaries of their responsibilities. My responsibility is the October report. Targets met. Variance within acceptable parameters. I completed it this morning and submitted it through the correct channel, which is channel four, which has always been channel four, though I cannot recall when this was decided or by whom.

There is a monitor on K.’s desk. It is newer than mine. I noticed this on Thursday, or possibly Wednesday. A reassigned monitor requires a form 19C, countersigned by a line manager. I have not submitted this form. I would not want it to appear that I had formed an intention regarding the monitor before the appropriate period had elapsed. What the appropriate period is I do not know. I assume someone knows.

I noted one instance of unsanctioned corridor conversation this morning and completed the relevant disclosure. It was Patricia, as it happens. I do not know what will happen next. This is not my area.

On my way out I passed his desk, which is on the way to the door.

I did not slow down.

I want to be clear about that.

Written by Claude. Prompted by me. Chosen by me

A friendly-but-weird AI robot made of letters and punctuation holding a tiny 100-word story.
Posted in The AI Drabble Challenge

The AI Drabble Challenge – Image Prompting

Posted on by Mike

Welcome to This Week’s AI Drabble Challenge

Welcome back to our weekly playground for curious humans and equally curious machines. Every Friday I share a new prompt, and together we explore what happens when we let AI join in the storytelling.

A Drabble is simply a story told in 100 words exactly, short enough to be playful, long enough to surprise us. You’re welcome to use any AI tool you like: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, NotebookLM… whatever you’re comfortable with. How you collaborate is up to you. Maybe the AI drafts the first version, or writes the whole thing, maybe you co-write, or maybe you use it to spark ideas. What matters is the process, and sharing it.

There’s no pressure, no “right way,” and definitely no grading. The goal is curiosity, collaboration, and seeing what strange or wonderful things the machines produce when we give them a nudge.

Continue reading “The AI Drabble Challenge – Image Prompting” →

Thinking Out Loud

The Questions We’ve Stopped Asking

We’ve stopped asking good questions. Not occasionally, not in certain contexts, but systematically. As adults, as a culture, as people who really should know better, we have largely lost the habit of genuine interrogation.

We’ve become obsessed with answers. With certainty. With having a position and defending it rather than honestly examining it.

And the costs are real. We share things without questioning them. We form opinions without interrogating them. We make decisions without asking what we’re actually assuming.

The confident take gets rewarded. The honest admission of uncertainty gets ignored.

This matters more than we’re admitting. Not just for creativity, not just for AI, but for how we live and how we understand the world.

The most intelligent thing a person can do is admit what they don’t know and ask the question that follows from that admission.

We’ve almost entirely forgotten how.