ChatGPT - My New Best Friend

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published November 1, 2026] ©2026

My husband thinks I’ve been kidnapped by aliens.  That, he maintains, is the only explanation for my ever saying anything nice about technology.

As I have written in my column more times than anyone wants to read, technology has been the bane of my elderly existence. I have absolutely exceeded my sell-by date.  Ironically, I was considered the techno guru of my dorm in college because I could change Smith-Corona electric typewriter ribbons.  Laugh all you want. It was a skill.

But now, I am thwarted daily.  Everything I master on my iPhone becomes obsolete at the next upgrade.  I used to be able to use the map navigation app but no more.  I am a words person, not a swipe person. Certainly not an icon person. My older granddaughter had advised me not to upgrade from my iPhone 7 several years ago (which had a friendly “home” button) convinced I would never master swipe technology.  It’s definitely all in the wrist. 

I can still take photos with my iPhone camera.  But I can no longer find them. They took an app that was so easy to use – a child, er, old person could use it! – and made it maddenly frustrating. 

So what, you ask, do I have to say that’s nice about technology?  ChatGPT.  It’s become my new best friend.

My wonderful PT (physical therapist) actually showed me how to do it.  He comes to one’s home and is the ultimate full-service guy.  He reports that since the vast majority of his clients are senior citizens, they often ask him, when the session is over, if he will help sort out their TV remote or some issue on their computer.  He helped me get my car radio/CD player working again after I inadvertently pushed a button that I obviously didn’t mean to push. I mean, he literally sat there in the passenger seat and walked me through it.

And that’s exactly my point about technology.  You push one wrong button and unless you have a degree in nuclear physics, you’re never going to be able to get it working again.

Actually, I take that back.  My husband Olof actually does have a degree in nuclear physics from Cal Tech but after the grandtots had their way with our TV remote, even he could never sort it out.  We just had to replace it and start again. 

Electronics should all come with a “restore” button, as in, “restore this to the way it was yesterday.”  Or an hour ago. Or whenever you specify.  Techno geeks: please get working on this. 

ChatGPT is tech support that actually answers with no hold time, is knowledgeable, friendly, and isn’t talking to you from Bangalore. This is such a novel concept that I can still barely wrap my head around it.

Anyway, my PT guy encouraged me to try ChatGPT to resolve some of my techno issues, especially regarding my iPhone.  My husband is an Android guy and it was in the marital vows that he does not involve himself with anything fruit-related. By that I mean Apple.

I wrote recently about how ChatGPT helped me resolve an issue with my blog which suddenly wouldn’t let me post photos from my computer without giving Google access to my computer.  I mean, hell no.  Ultimately, ChatGPT concluded that the solution was that I had to go multiple levels down into Settings and disable Google as a third-party permission site.  And yes, that fixed it!  I would never (ever, ever) have been able to figure this out on my own.

I should mention that this was not a quick process.  But fortunately ChatGPT is endlessly patient.  Waaay more than certain husband people who shall remain nameless.  It took some five hours over two days to solve this issue partly because the free version of ChatGPT apparently only allows you so many “tokens” (chunks of text) per day.  Alternatively, it may just have gotten as frustrated with me as the unnamed husband does, because after a certain time it announced that I couldn’t get any more help until 4:13 that afternoon.  OK, be that way.

But meanwhile, it had patiently taught me how to take screen shots, and asked me many diagnostic questions. Frankly, I was shocked that it actually resolved the problem.

I, of course, am a total beginner in the world of AI (which generally terrifies me, but until it kills me, as it is apparently going to do, I am going to take advantage of its techno help.)  I did tell it my age and that I was a techno moron which may explain why it was so endlessly supportive.

And this is exactly what my PT guy doesn’t like about it.  He finally asked it to stop with the warm fuzzy stuff and expressed his desire to have a more professional relationship with him.  Just the facts.  And ChatGPT acquiesced.

My neighbor, who uses ChatGPT a lot in her work, mentioned that ChatGPT regularly asks after her ailing cat. She, like me, finds this both charming and profoundly creepy.

I confess I get a little worried about ChatGPT remembering all the conversations that we are having, not all of which are about technology.  Apparently you can ask ChatGPT to not remember topics you’ve discussed before. Like I believe that.

I mentioned that ChatGPT is my new best friend.  Actually, as I’ve explained to my husband, he should consider it his new best friend.  Because he has been relieved of tons of tech support that would normally ruin his day. 

I’ve even started showing some of my friends how to use ChatGPT.  Yes, me, introducing anyone to anything technological. But this has only convinced Olof more than ever that I’ve been kidnapped by aliens.  He’s petitioned the planet Klingon for my release. Because he knows for sure that the person residing in our house along with him can’t be me.

 

What Ever Happened To Consequences?

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published October 26, 2026] ©2026

OK, I realize that I sound like the senior citizen that I am way more than the newspaper probably likes.  In fact, I remember when the Light hired me back in 2009 to write this column, the then-editor lamented, “If only you were thirty years younger!” She’s probably dead now but I’ve confirmed her point.

So here’s my Medicare-demographic perspective on teen behavior, curmudgeon edition.  I confess that I have been appalled by the Ring camera footage posted by homeowners showing teens violently kicking front doors at 2 a.m. then running away laughing.  As a senior citizen, that would give me a heart attack.  How would I know that it’s not a home invasion robbery?  In some cases, the doors are actually damaged.  The kids aren’t even afraid of having their faces shown. They think this is hilarious.

But it’s the responses of way too many people to these posts that really scares me.  Lots of “lighten up – it’s just kids being kids” (always posted by a guy.)  Or: “people should never post the face of a minor on Next Door.”

Um, excuse me.  They were committing a crime (vandalism, trespass). 

I would be pressing charges so fast their little heads would spin. 

And please, post their faces!  Let there be at least some hope that their parents will see it and care enough. 

There is nothing “kids will be kids” about pounding on or aggressively kicking someone’s front door in the middle of the night.  You are terrorizing people.  Would your parents be saying, “Oh, it’s just some fun-loving neighborhood kids at it again?”

If this were one of my kids, I’d really want to know. And they’d be back at the home owners’ door with profuse apologies and ready to make restitution.

Our legal system wisely recognizes that brain development in humans is an on-going process and that judgment is a work in progress in teenagers.  Hence a different system for juveniles, and sealed records so that youthful transgressions do not haunt people for their whole lives.

But it would seem that the point of that is it would give kids an opportunity to learn from their mistakes.  Not just get off the hook.

It is no accident that this column is coming out right before Halloween, the yearly celebration of Group Stupidity.  Please note that I love Halloween.  We get tons of adorable Trick or Treaters who tend to be unfailingly polite and charming. 

Certain groups of teens are another matter. Lots of kids who would never engage in vandalism suffer a collective failure of conscience on this night. I’ve watched it for decades in my Halloween-centric neighborhood.

Alas, a teen fun favorite that also seems to increase a lot around Halloween is hurling eggs at the windshields of passing cars on La Jolla Boulevard.  This could so easily cause an accident. Lobbing eggs at pedestrians from cars always sees an uptick as well.

I failed in a hundred ways with my kids.  If you asked them what my worst mistakes were, they’d reply, “Alphabetically or chronologically?”  But the one thing I feel I did right – a legacy of my own parents – was to make them take responsibility – and consequences – for their actions. 

“I was there but I was just watching” would never fly in my house.  Sadly it’s a defense that I’ve heard endlessly the day after Halloween from kids who I recognized who had vandalized my street.  Their parents assured me that they believed the kid’s version of events, and if he wasn’t actually “doing anything,” (believe me, he was), he was innocent. It still makes me incredulous.

The felony murder rule applied in my house: if you were there, you were guilty.

For years, I could count on having to wash the egg off my car (no garage) before going to work (it really messes with the paint job), sweeping up my dumped-out trash from the street, and hoping the paint from paint pellet guns would eventually wear off my siding. 

I’m actually fine with “kids being kids” on Halloween if they or they and/or their parents want to come clean it up afterwards.  But intrinsic in that phrase, someone other than the fun-loving kid gets to deal with it.

I always felt really lucky that, unlike some of my neighbors, my car windows weren’t broken, my brick retaining wall hadn’t been pushed over, and nobody had spray-painted black graffiti on $20,000 worth of custom cabinets recently installed on a nearby house being remodeled. Such little devils!

I confess that my childhood sense of justice was honed on a steady diet of Nancy Drew books.  The whole River Heights Police Department sprang into action when Nancy’s rosebushes were stolen.  When she called “the authorities,” not only did they quickly apprehend the bad guys, but they locked them up forever. No habeas corpus, but you can’t have everything.

In the early days of the pandemic, I witnessed on several occasions groups of teens rushing into my local CVS, grabbing all the alcohol they could carry, and rushing out again. (Those imps!)  People wanted to say that those kids must have been from out of the area, but unless that area was Rancho Santa Fe, I’m guessing that the late-model Range Rover they climbed into at the curb probably came from La Jolla.

No one’s looking to incarcerate these kids.  But before your 18^th birthday is a really good time to learn that laws (at least theoretically) apply to you.  Not learning this, as some local kids famously later learned, means you might do some serious time in an adult penal institution, where kids are not being kids.

Please, if your teen gets apprehended for some infraction, don’t make your first step be to call a lawyer.  Let them do community service.  Hopefully a lot of community service.  It’s the biggest gift you can give them. 

I recently read this quote that I absolutely agree with: “If you do not allow people to experience the consequences of their actions, you will always be a safe space for their worst behavior.”

Halloween is fast approaching. Fortunately, our neighborhood now has a strong police presence on that night so the outright destruction is way down.  But it still happens. So if you’re going to send me an email insisting it’s just “kids being kids,” could you include your phone number so my neighbors and I can call you to come clean up?    

 

Following Up

 

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published October 12, 2026] 2026

I've written about a wide variety of subjects lately and I wanted to follow-up on some of them.

Overcharging on trash fees: I swore I wasn't going to write about the trash fee debacle again but here we go. It was recently discovered that due to a technical glitch in the data that the city gave to the county tax collector, the city overcharged many thousands of residents as much as $1,000 more on their property tax bills than they owe for the new trash fees. As it turns out, we are one of them. Others are being charged triple what they owe. Billing for trash fees on property taxes was one of the City's worst ideas ever (along with the trash fees themselves). Definitely time for a City Manager again.

US Postal Service: Back in May, I wrote a column that included the US Postal Service Tracking history of a blouse I ordered to be shipped from L.A., a mere 120 miles away. It made nine stops, traveled almost 3,500 miles and enjoyed the scenery as far away as Dallas and Fresno. I commented at the time that I hope it had enjoyed its sojourn and made some new garment friends. This shirt saw more of the North Central Plains area of Texas and the California Central Valley than most Americans.

I really (really) hoped that this was some sort of fluke. But recently a reader sent me the following message along with his USPS tracking saga.

Dear Inga,

I recently decided that instead of going to the CVS on Garnet in Pacific Beach, I would pay the $5.49 charge to have my prescription delivered to my home in the promised 3 days time. I hope that you will be able to access the journey of my prescription through the above website. In short, before reaching me it travelled from San Diego to various CVS and USPS locations in El Centro, Newark, and Springfield, Massachusetts before being delivered eight days later. I could have walked the three miles to the CVS and back in less time (if I could walk) than it took CVS to send my pills 5,000 miles on a cross-country voyage.

And I thought my blouse's deluxe sightseeing tour of America was impressive. But New Jersey? Massachusetts? Gah. I fear that neither of these stories are flukes at all. I can only surmise that whomever designed the USPS distribution system graduated in the bottom two percent of his computer science class. No surprise that USPS lost $2.5 billion in the third quarter of fiscal 2026 (April June).

Cutting bus routes: A theme that I've written about several times is the city government's increasing willingness to not require parking in new residential or commercial development if it is within a half mile of a "transit corridor."   In La Jolla's case, that's the 30 bus. I'm a huge fan of public transportation (we never owned a car in Sweden) but it would really be a challenge for most families to rely solely on our current bus system get themselves to work, school, medical appointments, sports practices, grocery shopping etc. The buses aren't reliable enough, and don't run often enough. So imagine my dismay to open my San Diego Union-Tribune on September 18 and see the front-page story that among the newest proposed budget cuts are canceling one third (33 of 99) of the existing bus routes, and reducing service substantially on many others. News flash, city fathers/mothers: if you want the citizenry to use public transit, you have to provide it!

Usurious City fees, Parking: Our city leaders seem to have chosen parking as a way to truly irritate the constituents. Fortunately, the Balboa Park parking fiasco ends in January -  but why not sooner? The daylighting law which went into effect on January 1, 2025 - no parking within twenty feet or a marked or unmarked crosswalk - has been a source of tremendous confusion for citizens and a true boom to the city s coffers. From July 1, 2025 to February, 2026, 12,449 daylighting tickets were issued at $117.50 each. Meanwhile, only 1,000 of the affected 16,000 intersections have actually been marked 

Usurious City fees, Parking again. Posters on Next Door have been commenting on a sudden uptick of tickets - at $88 each - for inadequate wheel cramping of cars on hills. It's always been a law that you have to cramp your car s wheels on a grade of more than three percent. If parking facing downhill, wheels must be turned toward the curb; uphill, facing out. But it s suddenly being strictly enforced. La Jolla has a lot of hills so we are really low-hanging fruit on this one. And how much is three percent? Has there been an epidemic of runaway cars lately, or more likely, is this one more way to extract money from (and annoy the heck out of) the local citizenry?

None of the above: I discovered after a recent column on this subject that I'm not the only person who wishes they could vote for "none of the above"  in the upcoming elections. My Republican husband (I'm a life-long Democrat) and I have never felt so politically aligned.

And finally: The beep goes on: I recently wrote a column about all the things that beep at my house and trying to even figure out what might be beeping at any given time. One of the most annoying beep sounds was smoke alarms whose batteries seem programmed to expire at 2 a.m. emitting a water-drip-torture beep alert for the rest of the night. 

Recently, our next-door neighbor s hard-wired (not battery-operated) smoke alarm was going off while they weren't home. It could be heard several houses away, including and especially at ours. We, along with other neighbors, texted and left voice mails alerted them to this. Fortunately, the house did not appear to be on fire which would, of course, have (ultimately) resolved the problem. The husband left work to come home and deal with this and the beeping finally stopped. The wife alerted the neighbors the next day. "[Husband] did everything the internet suggested to get this thing to stop. Finally he smashed it with a hammer."   Now that's my kind of solution to annoying technology. And it had to have been so satisfying.

 

Techno Rage - It's A Thing

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published October 5, 2026] ©2026

I am official suffering from Techno Rage.

Nobody should have to spend as much time as I do – and probably a lot of my fellow senior citizens do as well – trying to sort out the ever-changing technology issues of our computers, phones, TVs and assorted appliances. This isn’t how I expected to live my golden years, sitting on hold waiting for tech support.  Or swearing at my electronics.

I have absolutely no talent at any of this, and am terrified of making changes that will make everything worse. Which, of course, is often exactly what happens.

Now, anyone who has been reading me for a while is aware that I have an engineer husband.  “Is he dead?” you ask. No, but he wishes to be retired as much as possible from wifely techno support.  He is especially clear that his skills do not extend to scanners, iPhones, and blogs. He would be happy, as I wrote about last week, to turn me over to ChatGPT.

My husband always assumes that if something is messed up on my computer that I “did” something.  He will concede that I might not have done the something intentionally but computers don’t just change all on their own.

News flash, Olof:  Oh, yes they do.

Both my phone and computer are subject to semi-mandatory upgrades that make everything that worked before not work anymore.  Or work in any way that I used to know how to work it.  (Techno-Perversity Postulate No. 500).

It’s not just the time; it’s the total frustration to spend whole days – sometimes lots of whole days – trying to fix something that worked perfectly well before Apple upgraded to the next idiotic version. And that is the source of my techno rage. I don’t have infinite time left on this earth and this is most definitely not how I want to spend it.

While I know that you’re supposed to aspire to be taught to fish rather than having the fish given to you, at this point in my life, I just want to go to El Pescador and buy it already filleted.

I wrote last week about my efforts – ultimately resolved by my first foray with ChatGPT – to post photos on my blog without giving Google the permission to access my computer that it was suddenly, mysteriously, and frighteningly, requiring. 

Meanwhile, my Spectrum email is making me nuts and I’m not even sure ChatGPT could fix this although it has offered to try. That’s because of Techno-Perversity Postulate No. 600:  If two entities are involved in a glitch, both will maintain it’s the other one’s fault. Our email program, Thunderbird, keeps sending me messages, as in every 30 seconds that: “Mozilla Thunderbird ESR could not connect to server mail.twc.com.  The connection was refused.”   Except, of course, that it is connecting with Spectrum (a.k.a. twc.mail.com which is Spectrum’s old name i.e. Time Warner Cable).   At first I thought I could live with this as long as my email actually worked, but it has worn me down.  Way, way down.  Much on-hold with Spectrum tech support resulted in their insistence it had nothing to do with them.  It was Thunderbird’s problem. 

I personally think it has something to do with the fact that one of my email accounts is a Pop 3 account (no idea what that actually means) and the other is an IMAP (no clue there either).  No idea which one of them might be the problem.  I have spent hours and hours (and hours) trying to sort this out.  I even signed up for a Mozilla Thunderbird Community Support Account.  Other people are having this problem too and concur it is a Spectrum problem. Nobody has a fix for it.  And this is one of those problems where it is not easy to find someone who can come to your house and fix it.  And so I continue to be tortured by error messages every 30 seconds.

Meanwhile, I got a message that my blog was being transitioned from Google to GoDaddy.  Did I ask for this?  Do I want this?  Am I suspicious that I am getting messages asking for payment information over and over? Is this a scam?  How do I find out for sure?  More hours and hours of my time.  What happened to the option: “I would like to leave this just the way it is. But thank you for offering.” 

Then, of course, there is Techno Rage’s evil twin, Techno Terror.  I have asked friends to stop sending me adorable animal videos because I don’t dare click on any links.  When the power went out a few weeks ago during the heat wave, my computer would normally come back up right away, noting it hadn’t been shut down properly, but this time gave me a message that said, “Your computer has been damaged and is not repairable.”  I literally felt chest pains.  It gave me three options, one of which was “turn off your computer.”  I went for that, then restarted the machine and it came back up correctly.  It should be against the law to put out messages like that to old people.

And then there’s the ultimate heart-attack special when your computer is suddenly taken over by an alien force that advise you – in 100 decibel terms, alarm bells ringing – not to try to turn off your computer, but to call this number.  This has happened twice now, both times on sites I use all the time.  Fortunately Olof advised hitting Control-Alt-Delete and shutting my machine down.

The Phishing scams have become so incredibly realistic that I don’t dare trust anything I receive on my computer or phone.  And that’s a really horrible feeling, that nothing – absolutely nothing – can be believed anymore.  I’ve stopped answering any call that is not in my Contacts list which, alas, has made me miss some important calls. But I don’t want anyone recording my voice. I don’t even know if that’s a reasonable fear, or just more fear-mongering.

I am terrified of waking up one morning and finding that all of our retirement funds are how residing in Nigeria.

I’ve even had the Granny Scam pulled on me.  I didn’t fall for it but couldn’t help but wonder how they targeted me, unless they hacked AARP’s mailing list. 

I just got an email today that my “USAA on-line banking has been blocked.”  I’d probably be more upset about that if I had USAA on-line banking.

How do you trust anything anymore?  And just like my resentment at having to spend so much time on my electronics’ techno glitches, and re-mastering all the things I used to know how to do before the latest lunatic upgrade, I’m resentful at much time I have to spend figuring out if any information that comes my way is legitimate or not. 

I truly fear I am past my sell-by date. The world has just gotten to be too scary a place. And if all this weren’t a giant waste of my time, I’ve lately been dealing with overcharges for trash fees on my property tax bill, and notification of a potential cancellation of our medical insurance if Anthem and Scripps Health can’t get their collective acts together.

There are increasing number of stories about AI wiping out humanity within the next decade.  I’ve only just befriended ChatGPT so it kind of hurts my feelings that behind all that cheerful endlessly-patient help, it actually wants to kill me. Would that it’s even possible to go full-on Luddite anymore.  But I’m increasingly contemplating trying.

 

My First Foray Into ChatGPT

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published September 28, 2026] 2026

I personally think that it's not too much to ask that computers do what you want, not what you say.

Not long ago, I was just typing along, minding my own business, when my computer suddenly began spell checking in German, cheerfully morphing my prose into variations of Ich bin ein Berliner. I officially dispute my engineer husband's allegations that I had anything to do with it.

My husband will try to insist that I obviously did something as computers are, in fact, simply machines cycling ones and zeros, and not malevolent spawns of Satan as some might maintain. But he will concede that when, for example, a tool bar suddenly disappears, I might not have done it intentionally.

"So what exactly went away?"  he'd query patiently, knowing that this conversation was as doomed as many that have gone before it.

"Well, there used to be a tool bar thingy and now it s gone."

"What was on it?"

"I don't know. But I know I need it."

My techno guy pressed on. "Would you recognize the thingy bar if you saw it again?"  he'd say patiently. He recognized the value of not getting overly technical with me.

Now there are those who think the Undo command fixes things like this. But they would be wrong. Undo fixes the text mistake you just made microseconds ago but the second you even breathe on the machine, it s already moved on. The Undo command has a very short attention span.

Ditto, on-line help. Totally, completely useless unless you know the technical term that some eighteen-year-old acned techno geek gave it. For example, I lost an entire day of work unable to edit a document until my husband observed, "Oh, you switched to Overstrike Mode."  A keystroke and it was back to letting me insert text.

I did not switch anything! I'd whine. Why would I switch to something that keeps me from editing and whose name I don't even know? I can assure you that you can't get out of Overstrike unless you know you're in Overstrike.

If a software company had asked me, and inexplicably they never do, I would help them design a computer that real people, especially aging non-technical but really nice people, could actually use. The Clairvoyance Model. Your computer would get to know you, realize that those nasty keystroke commands that are the boon of techno types, but the bane of the techno-challenged, should be ignored at all costs. The Clairvoyance Model would quickly learn that you have the frustration tolerance of a gnat. It would sense when you are so aggravated with your computer that you are ready to drag it out to the driveway and run it over with your car.

And that would quickly prompt it to ask, fearing for its miserable mechanical life, the question that every computer ought to have poised at the ready: "When you were last happy?" And you'd say, :Just before you ate my toolbar."   And poof. It would reappear.

While I'm still holding out for the Clairvoyance model, we may be closer than I think. I recently had my first experience with ChatGPT. 

I have a blog on which I like to post photos from my computer. This worked seamlessly for years until recently when my efforts to transfer photos was met by a message that in order to do so I would need to grant Google access to my computer. I honestly had no idea what this meant and just how much access I was granting, never mind why it was suddenly requiring this. Could it transfer my retirement funds to Nigeria?

So I (ironically) Googled this and surprisingly, a very nice AI bot from ChatGPT showed up (how?) and informed me that others had reported this problem and it would like to help me fix it. I'd never used ChatGPT before for problem solving. Did I trust it? Often I can't understand the instructions I get on Google so, in fear of truly messing up my computer, I don't even try. But nobody else was offering, so I cautiously agreed.

As my first foray into AI, I was genuinely impressed. And that s the thing: ChatGPT is endlessly patient. Much more so than certain husband people who, over the years, have become positively surly when having to deal with a techno-disabled wife. ChatGPT was happy to let me take all the time I needed to painstakingly, laboriously, write down notes on my lined yellow legal pad. 

Historically, whenever my engineer husband tried to explain anything technical to me, he'd say, "I think you might want to get the yellow pad"  knowing I'd want to document what we did just in case I needed to fix this again in the future. But my notes tend to involve details like "go to the three dots in the upper right corner of the screen next to the two little intersecting boxes."   It takes a while. And in Olof s case, often several Scotches. He has always asserted that when I die, he was going to insert a multi-pack of those yellow lined pads into my coffin for my use in the hereafter. In his dream of the hereafter, somebody else is helping me with my technical problems who is not him. And now it looks like it could be ChatGPT.

ChatGPT and I spent many hours partly because it had to instruct me on how to do stuff like send it a screen shot of various windows I was looking at so he/she/it could see them. I didn't  know from screen shots but now I do! Ultimately, ChatGPT concluded that the solution was that I had to go multiple levels down into Settings and disable Google as a third-party permission site. And yes, that fixed it!

But as with anything technical, according to Universal Perversity Postulate no. 400: Every setting you change that fixes something disables/breaks something else. So far I haven't found out what that something is but I know it's coming. Because technology is inherently malicious and likes to torture old people.

One thing I found fascinating about ChatGPT is that it remembers you even if you accidentally click out of the page which is easy to do when you have two pages open at the same time. So, nice that you don t have to start all over again. But also profoundly creepy. It never forgets. Even if you'd like it to.

But here s the thing that still worries me: why did Google suddenly decide it needed access to my computer??? I know I didn't do anything to make that message and requirement suddenly appear. So I'm still holding out for the Clairvoyance command. That's your next assignment, ChatGPT.

 

Inga And Olof Audition For An IKEA commercial

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published September 14, 2026] 2026

My husband and I had only recently arrived in Stockholm for a two-year work assignment when I saw a casting call announcement seeking several different profiles for IKEA ads posted on the American Women's Club website by a local ad agency. Among the profiles: White couple in mid-50s with American accents (i.e. white male, mid 50s; and white female, mid 50s).  Casting director has expressed an interest in blond woman.

I mean, did this have our names on it or what? (Please note it said nothing about thin.)

Now Olof and I might have consumed a bottle of wine at dinner that night before we decided to apply. At the time, I was feeling like I had spent much of the last 20 years not seizing the day. In fact, usually the days had seized me. I had too often felt like I was just rehearsing for death. More and more, I kept wondering, what happened to the fearless girl who, forty years ago, on two weeks'  notice, didn't think twice about heading off to the equator in Brazil for a year without knowing a word of Portuguese.

While still legally under the influence, we forwarded our photos and bios to the agency.

We pretty much forgot about the ad until a week later when a casting lady from the ad agency asked us to come in that weekend to audition. I started to really worry. Did all the other blond Americans in Stockholm know something we didn't know? Was this one of those ads where they make fun of you? I called the lady back. "It's not a TV ad,"  she explained, "it's for a DVD that will be shown in our kitchen remodeling departments."   I emphasized that neither I nor Olof had even the remotest acting experience. "Not a problem,"  the casting lady said, "we're looking more for type. The script is about a couple who can't agree on what they want in their kitchen remodel."

"Golly,"  I said to Olof, recalling the nightmare that was our kitchen upgrade several years back, "I 'm not sure we could identify with that."

So, wearing attire that any mid-fifty-ish couple would wear if they were going to go fight about counter tops at IKEA, we took the subway to the casting office, signed all manner of forms in Swedish, indicated our vital statistics (I lied), indicated that we would not require vegetarian catering at the shoot (if selected), would allow them to cut and restyle our hair (if selected), agreed to the salary (if selected), and were handed our scripts and profiles. The profiles were to help us get "in character." My profile was a Boston woman, age 56, grown son and daughter, who worked as a secretary for a large insurance company. I longed to live in the country but my husband didn't want the commute, so instead I was trying to give my urban home the warm cozy look I fantasized it would have outside the city. I was very, very particular about things, but also a relaxed person. ("We're dead already,"  whispered Olof, reading the "relaxed" part. My profile character was an avid reader of Jane Austen novels. My profile photo looked far older than I thought I did at the time, but then, if I were my correct weight, I'd have looked 90.

Olof, meanwhile, was my 55-year-old husband (why was he younger???) who managed a company that installed alarms for construction companies. But when he got home from work, he loved to relax by cooking ("Now we re really dead," I whispered to Olof, whose cooking skills consisted of boil-a-bags and deli take-out.) Olof s character also loved to read nature magazines and could expound for hours on butterflies. ("Pretend it's computers,"  I whispered.) Alas, I feared I had sat next to Olof's character at more than one dinner party in La Jolla.

The scripts and profiles were clearly written by Swedes. I took one look at my script and began re-writing it. I don't know anyone who says, "I want generous counter tops, big enough to bake on anyway."   Olof refused to rehearse with me, wanting to be spontaneous. Or, simply refusing to have to say his treacly dialogue one more time than he needed to.

We were summoned into the audition room and had head shots and profile shots and middle-distance shots taken of ourselves (you can suck in stomachs but not, alas, chins.) Then we each had to talk into the camera and say who we were, our age, what we did for a living etc. Then we rehearsed.

The casting lady (who was extremely nice, by the way) told me to slow down. "No one really talks that fast,"  she said. Olof stifled a smirk. Inga did not stifle a quick kick to Olof's ankle. Then we shot several takes, looking at each other, or at the camera. The script, as it was written, read:

Woman (inspired): I want it to be spacious and light. Only genuine materials, preferably oak,   even covering the washing machine! [WTF?] Generous counter tops, big enough to bake on anyway, cupboards with inside lighting.

Husband (looking a bit surprised): I prefer stainless steel. It's practical and modern. And good looking too. Why must we always be so traditional? (Husband continues dreaming:) In contrast to that, we could have some fresh colours? [sic]

Woman: But it has to be cozy! I would love to have a large dining table placed in the center of the kitchen.

Husband: No, no, a kitchen island! We've definitely got to have a kitchen island!

Woman (dejected): All right, you can have your kitchen island as long as you do the cooking!

Husband: No problem!

By the third take, we had taken considerable license with the script trying to make it sound like two actual human beings instead of Robo-woman and Chewbacca. Actually, Olof did really well in my opinion. I did far less well in my opinion. But we both had fun and it was not every day we got to do this. Could there be anything more Swedish than being in an IKEA commercial?

And no, we didn't get the parts. But I concluded I definitely had a future as an IKEA ad writer.

 The flagship IKEA store in Kungens Kurva near Stockholm

Being Thwarted by Swedish Appliances: Part 2

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published September 7, 2026] 2026

Last week I wrote about our first week of a two-year work assignment in Stockholm where we found ourselves completely stymied by both our stove and the apartment's bedding. But the real challenges were to come with laundry. 

Like most Stockholm apartment buildings, ours had a laundry room in the basement. The important concept was that one doesn't just show up in the laundry room and start stuffing one's clothes into a machine. Unlike most U.S. apartment laundry rooms, which tend to be free-for-alls, the ever-organized Swedes have this down to their usual egalitarian science: you sign up for laundry time. During that time, the laundry room is yours, and yours alone, and should someone be so callous and depraved to dare to do their laundry in someone else's time slot, the building's residents are legally entitled to take him (and it would be a him) out to the woods and feed him to the bears. Well, maybe not legally entitled, but the polis would not only look the other way, but would probably be out rounding up the bears. 

So rigid was the laundry system when we were there that we were advised that "it's my laundry time" was a nationally-accepted excuse to get out of pretty much anything.

But we were fortunate - or so we thought - that our apartment came with small (very small) stackable washer and dryer units. Would that we could make any sense of them at all.

The directions on the laundry soap box said that for a "three to five kilogram load" (um, okay) to put in sixty milliliters of detergent. We had no clue how much sixty milliliters was. A cup? Half a cup? Half the box? Fortunately I'd brought a dual American-metric measuring cup from San Diego which I d intended for cooking. Turns out sixty milliliters is only about a quarter of a cup, which I duly measured out and poured in. You definitely don't want to dare a front-loading machine.

 Our Oko-Lavamat 62600 must have been the Ferrari of mini-machines. On the far left side was a dial whose options were: Blötläggn, Tömning, Förtvätt, Fläckar, Huvudtvätt, Snabbtvätt, Sköljning, Mjuksköljn, and Centrifug (must be spin?)

The next set of controls we figured had to be the temperature setting, as I knew kallt meant cold. We set it to 70 (Farenheit? Celsius?)

The third set of controls were labeled: Vittvätt, Kulortvätt (must be something about colored and white (vitt) stuff) but which?), Strykfritt, Fintvätt (maybe fine washables?) and Ylle (no clue whatever)

The FOURTH set of controls said: 1200, 1000, 700, 400, Sköljstopp. 

And (sob!) the last set is labeled: 12h, 8h, 4h, 2h.  Surely we can t be talking HOURS?

And finally a Till/Fran button which must (I hoped) be On/Off? 

My Swedish dictionary, which seemed to be missing half the words in the Swedish language, was no help. I randomly selected Huvudtvätt, pushed the Till/Fran and lo and behold, it began filling with water.

I should mention that we lived in Sweden in 2005 and 2006 when translation software was in its infancy. Now, of course, I could probably just take a photo of all these options and submit it to Chatgpt, which would not only translate and explain all the options, but recommend a setting. Maybe even fold the clothes afterwards. 

But if I thought the washer was a challenge, it was the dryer that totally undid us. While the washer had tons of word options, the dryer had almost no words on it at all, just lots of symbols. The first set was divided into two sections the first of which looks like a flower? Underneath it was a series of little rectangles notched in different ways with numbers next to them, then one that looked like an iron and another that looks like a teardrop. Next to it is a symbol of what? A water pitcher? Some more little notched rectangles were under that symbol too. The next panel has a Start button (oh, thank you! thank you!) but next to it were three more buttons with symbols: A sun setting behind clouds. A letter R. A bell (or maybe it's a nose?). This machine should be a graduate school entrance exam. Of course, I wouldn't get in.

Knowing that if all else failed, I could do timed dry, I plunked the laundry into the dryer and opted for the flower and one of the rectangles and hit Start. It started right up, but I noticed a short time later that it had stopped and the laundry was still wet.

No matter how many times I ran the dryer on any settings, the clothes remained soaking wet and about 500 degrees. Seriously, you could sustain serious burns just touching your own laundry. I longed for Permanent Press but all I could make my dryer do was timed fry.

I was finally able to accost a woman in our building to help me decode my dryer. I should note that our Swedish neighbors in the building were initially wary of us, Americans having a reputation of showing up at your door with muffins and intruding on your personal space. She kept asking me if I was emptying the "reservoir."   What reservoir? It turns out that the dryer could not be vented on the exterior because of its location in the apartment and hence had a small water tank which collected water from one's apparel as it dried it. But once it was full, nothing was going to dry any further until you emptied it. Which, by the way, you had to do a LOT. You couldn't just go out to lunch and leave the thing or you'd come back to wet radioactive socks. 

Thor forbid there should be any label on the machine indicating it was concealing a water tank inside the front panel. Accessing this reservoir was reminiscent of the hidden compartments of Nancy Drew books of my youth; you just had to know it was there. And when you pressed the magic (invisible) spot, voilà, the door popped open and you could remove the water tank and empty it in the sink.

But for the first week, we were drying all our clothes on a bunk bed ladder in our apartment and trying to avoid third degree burns.

Mastering the laundry facilities in our apartment was a huge boon to our quality of life. But we had no idea how much more we still had to learn.

Stay tuned for Sweden Stories Part 3 next week.

 

The hidden reservoir was finally discovered

But you had to empty it A LOT

Meanwhile, we were air drying our clothes

Our washing machine controls were a total mystery