I went to the deli for a simple mission: gather green pepper, fresh garlic, sausage, smoked ham. A straightforward task, executed weekly by competent humans. What I encountered, however, was Ahmed.
Ahmed is what I call a hazard disguised as a human being. This is the person who wields a cleaver and a meat slicer but operates with the cognitive speed of a dial-up modem. His mouth perpetually open, his eyes glazed, the kind of presence that makes you immediately audit your personal safety protocols.
Step one: request two slices of smoked ham, half an inch thick. For context, this is a unit of measurement taught before the age of seven.
Ahmed: “I don’t know what a half-inch is.”
At this point, one must ask: why are you handling sharp objects with this level of strategic incapacity? I demonstrate physically, fingers apart, a universal, nonverbal metric. Ahmed attempts replication. It fails spectacularly. The first slices arrive, Canadian-bacon thin.
Ahmed: “Are these okay?”
By this point, I am performing the equivalent of a trust fall into thin air. A new ham is opened. Ten minutes of wastage later, slices emerge. Finally, six thick slabs, mission accomplished. I select two and disengage.
In every interaction, evaluate risk, preserve your objective, and deploy patience as your primary tool. Some humans, like Ahmed, are variables, never constants.
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