Yesterday, a slender Norwegian man named Stan appeared at my door
presenting a Subway footlong with my name on it. Teriyaki chicken with
one half provolone cheese, one half Swiss. My first thought was to take
it and keep my mouth shut, as I hadn’t ordered a sandwich but was indeed
quite hungry. However, the confusion was quickly resolved, and I even
made a new friend out of the ordeal.
What happened is that my Clawdbot tapped into my GCM data and noticed my
blood sugar crashing quite rapidly around 11am. While not life
threatening, such a phenomenon would, at the very least, be a massive
productivity hit to my afternoon, and likely general mood. And so Clawd
took the liberty of being proactive.
Anyone who knows me, knows that I don’t like paying delivery fees,
especially for lunch. So a straightforward Uber Eats or DoorDash API
call was out of the question. Now I never explicitly told this to Clawd,
yet it was able to deduce as much too from past behavior. So this is
where it got very creative. Clawd sent out a few feelers to others of
his kind in my area, and quickly landed a hit with Stan’s. Stan lives 2
doors down from me and was in line at Subway ordering his own lunch at
the time. My Clawd talked to his about the potential of including my
order and dropping it off on his way home for a modest surcharge (much
less than an Uber Eats would charge). Well not only did Stan oblige, he
insisted on doing it at cost and would not accept even a tip, citing his
eagerness to be a good neighbor.
Now here’s where it gets even more interesting. In its research to
determine how I like my sandwiches, it came across a digitized version
of a 3^rd^ grade essay I wrote in which I describe a fondness for how my
grandma used to make them, half with provolone cheese, half with Swiss.
The teacher gave me a B-, with points being subtracted specifically for
the gratuitous nature of the sandwich details as the topic of the essay
was supposed to be George Washington. But what Miss Foster derided as
gratuitous and off topic, Clawd saw implied significance.
Anyway, the entire experience was quite positive and I’ve instructed
Clawd to continue to enable “auto sandwich” mode in the future, with the
one twist being to hold the mustard next time. I hate mustard.