What If the Dragon Wants Something Else?

It started on Friday with a dragon.

For Peeling Potatoes Episode 60, we asked:

What if the dragon doesn’t want to breathe fire?

A ridiculous question, obviously.

Dragons breathe fire. That is what dragons do. Somewhere, presumably, there is a dragon handbook explaining the procedure.

But what if this one wants marshmallow fluff and warm cocoa?

The question stayed with me.

Then came Monday.

My wife had a very important hospital appointment in Strasbourg. It went wrong. I am not going to turn the details into an anecdote. They belong to her, and the consequences mattered.

But one thought followed me out of the hospital.

Systems are necessary. Hospitals certainly need them. So do governments, businesses, schools and almost everything else we depend on.

The problem begins when the person standing inside or outside the system does not behave quite as the system expects.

Who is supposed to adapt then?

Afterwards, we wanted something wonderfully ordinary.

Coffee.

My wife mentioned an Egg McMuffin.

I hadn’t had one for years. Suddenly it sounded exactly right.

There was a McDonald’s nearby. I walked in knowing what I wanted, with the money to buy it.

This should have been an exceptionally easy sale.

Instead, I was confronted by a giant touchscreen.

Touch this. Find that. Choose this. Go back. Try again.

I tried.

Then I gave up.

McDonald’s had the product. I wanted the product. I had the money.

And somehow the system prevented the transaction.

I walked out angry.

Two doors down was a place called Cinnamood.

I’d never heard of it.

Cinnamon rolls. Utterly wicked things. Not cheap either, although on Place Kléber I imagine the landlord has views on that.

But there were people.

There was human service. There was a terrific atmosphere.

And there was an outrageously good cinnamon roll.

Cinnamood won.

Hands down.

And now, rather wonderfully, I am advertising them for free.

Nobody asked me to. Nobody paid me. They simply created an experience worth talking about.

McDonald’s had decades of brand recognition on its side. It got me through the door knowing exactly what I wanted.

Twenty minutes later, I was telling people about the business I had never heard of.

There are probably marketing departments spending fortunes trying to achieve exactly that.

Cinnamood managed it with cinnamon, sugar and a human being.

This isn’t an argument against technology.

That would be absurd.

Technology makes much of what we do at Brida possible. AI and automation allow a tiny organisation to do things that once would have required considerably more people, time and money.

But perhaps technology works best when it removes unnecessary work rather than removing the human moment.

Which brings me back to the dragon.

The dragon must breathe fire.

The patient must fit the process.

The customer must use the touchscreen.

The employee must follow the workflow.

Perhaps, occasionally, we should stop trying to correct the person and ask a simpler question:

Does this actually make human sense?

That question is increasingly at the heart of The Pineapple.

We tell stories about work, technology, families, travel, money, food, absurdities and ordinary life. Not because we have discovered the answers, but because interesting people everywhere are trying to make sense of the same changing world.

And we talk about it.

In English.

Which raises another question I have been thinking about.

Who says you need to book an entire course to practise and improve your English?

Read The Pineapple. Listen to it. Talk about it. Join a conversation. Tell us what happens in your world. Disagree with somebody. Explain something only you know. Ask a ridiculous question about a dragon.

Use your English because there is something worth saying.

Perhaps improvement does not always have to begin with a lesson.

Perhaps sometimes it begins with curiosity.

Or frustration.

Or somebody else’s story.

Or an Egg McMuffin you never actually managed to buy.

I don’t know exactly where the boundary between training, conversation, publishing and ordinary human life sits anymore.

I’m not sure I particularly want to.

I do know this.

On Monday, one system lost me.

Another human experience won me.

And on Friday, a dragon had already warned me why.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that the dragon won’t breathe fire.

Sometimes the problem is that nobody thought to ask what the dragon wanted to do instead.