Writing Boots

Sent after a cleaning last Thursday, with a new dental hygienist; names changed to protect the well-intentioned. —DM

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[Dr. T—], we’ve had good communications before in rare instances when I’ve been unhappy over nearly 20 years in your care …

Here’s another missive from me, after today’s visit.

I hope you can assure me you won’t ever put K— with me again. To my mind, she’s everything I hate about dentistry, and everything I appreciate not having to normally deal with at ABC Dental:

• Lots of nagging, about flossing, and getting an electric toothbrush. I’m a 56 year old man. I’m a little set in my ways. I don’t wanna hear it. Hovering over me, she asks me if I’ll start flossing every day. I say I will. She asks, “Do we have a deal?” I’m not eight.

• Gratuitous condescension. Out of the blue, she asked me, “What do you like most about your teeth?” I was stumped. She provided the correct answer: “They chew!” Again, not eight. 

• Terrible communication. She did a full standing head x-ray and then laborious x-rays of each one of my teeth, without saying why this elaborate action today. Deep into the x-rays, I finally forced her to pause, so I could ask. “They wanted me to x-ray all your teeth,” she finally said, later mumbling that it had been awhile since that had been done. Sorry, if you’re going to put someone though 15-20 minutes of gag reflexes, you tell them why upfront. Right?

• Brutal communication. While she was actively grinding away at my teeth, she began saying—I could barely hear her muffled masked voice over the grinding and the sucking—that my gums were somewhat inflamed and that she’d have to do a special cleaning that was going to exceed my deductible, by an amount she didn’t specify. I stopped her and told her in no uncertain terms that you do not negotiate money things with someone while your hands and sharp objects are in their mouth. She said, “Okay,” and agreed to drop the issue of the special cleaning, as long as I came back in four months, rather than six. Eager as hell to get out of there at any cost, I agreed to that. Then, a few minutes later, she scheduled me for the regular six months, without mentioning the four-month interval.

• Dishonest dealing. She asked if I normally did a fluoride treatment. I said no. She said I should. I didn’t say anything, and didn’t do any fluoride treatment. The receptionist tried to charge me for the fluoride treatment. I said I hadn’t gotten it. She said, “You didn’t get sticky stuff on your teeth?” I said, “No.” I wasn’t charged.

• Rough behavior. She flossed my teeth at the end so roughly that I thought maybe she sensed through my safety glasses that I was composing this email to you in my head, and wanted to get a few licks in on me.

Dr. T—, much as I love the care I’ve gotten at ABC Dental, much as K— might have had a bad day or might have not liked the cut of my jib, I’ll change dentists before I deal with her again. Can you make a note on my file and give me the assurance I need?

Thanks,

David

***

Postscript: From Dr. T—:

“Thanks for that feedback. That is helpful info for us. Your sense of humor and writing style is awesome! Definitely no more appointments with K— for you.”

I was tested last week, by a colleague. I passed. Or failed, depending on how you think about it.

I wrote the promo copy for a conference website.

It was up to my colleague to create an eblast, to get people to go to the website and register for the conference.

She didn’t want the eblast to simply repeat the website copy. She also didn’t want to make me rewrite the website copy.

So she fed my website copy into Microsoft Copilot, to generate a letter with my copy as a starting point, but altered.

For example, it turned this intro copy from the website …

… into this opening for the eblast:

Which didn’t look too bad at first. Until I started tweaking. I mean, I wouldn’t put “manage through” in quotes like that. Also, I don’t believe there’s some pre-existing “set of tactics” that will “move us forward”? Also, I don’t say, “move us forward,” because I don’t believe “we,” are really supposed to move in any one direction, like a bunch of corporate robots. And I like the sound of “stronger, not just busier.” But I don’t really think stronger versus busier is the operative dichotomy here.

In short, I wouldn’t have written that shit!

After about six exciting minutes of editing it back toward what I had originally written, I wrote to my colleague that I simply couldn’t stand the agony of editing AI-altered copy to read more like the copy I’d already agonized to write!

I thanked my colleague for trying. I acknowledged that I might be being totally prissy about this—it’s just marketing copy, right?—and that someday I might let it go. But I feel that writing absolutely as carefully as I can from the mind of this three-decade observer on this subject to what I perceive is the mind of the reader who I’ve also known for three decades is one of the important bits of value I add to this whole process. And I just can’t let a machine start taking chances with it.

And I rewrote the whole thing, the way I wanted it to sound. And my colleague understood.

I did think back on a moment when I could have really used AI. I worked for a marketing agency once, and they occasionally assigned press releases to me. It got back to me that the PR director there complained bitterly about my releases, because they were “too much David Murray!” Well, I could have fed those David Murray releases into that AI wood-chipper, and satisfied this person entirely. But God made me for greater things than writing press releases devoid of the spirit that God gave me in the first fucking place.

NEXT!