vanderwal.net

I squidgle into the vinyl booth bench solo and the bench across is empty too, as I sit next to the window and gaze at the people headed to work with their eyes mostly down at their screens. A few wearing Murdock News and Entertainment glasses have their heads up, but their faces are looking very lost.

I haven’t been in this cafe since it was Grand-son Diner and run by a Japanese family that had owned it for about 15 years. The family had changed it from Chuck’s Original Diner that had been here for more than 60 years. Grand-son mostly kept the menu with traditional diner options, but offered ramen and handrolls. I’m still sad the family was deported for “surface issues”, as they all had been born here and their grandparents had been in internment camps during the last “real great war”.

I am in need of coffee and still a little bleary from short sleep after a good dinner catching up with friends the night before. I’m keeping my wake time during my month of “sabbatical” as the company is “reworking” during “needed IT downtime”. Most employees are on sabbatical as an AI coding service errantly modified all network connections for corporate cloud environments to local drives in the developer’s sandboxes. This spread across all main corporate systems. In nine months an AI had rebuilt all the enterprise systems, but there was no documentation, and no enterprise architecture mappings of what should connect to what and how.

I reach for a menu as grey clouds cover the sun and through my own fog I realize I’m at the diner for coffee and breakfast and to gather my thoughts for the day. The ad on the side of the napkin holder changes to “Barky’s AI Pet Services” and a voice says, “Good morning Steven”. I look around and there are two other customers in the diner and one of them is at the counter. I realized it is the napkin holder talking to me.

“Who is Steven?” I reply. The corners of the napkin holder rise gently and seem to have small articulating arms that have what look like tiny wet wipes. They run across the top of the long side edges of the napkin holder. The wipe on my side seems to have hit a spot of what appears to be petroleum jelly and spread it across the top of the holder. I can see a tiny spot where the blob of jelly had been that looks like a camera. The arms retract and soon appear again to repeat the task. As they retract again I can clearly see it is a tiny dot of a camera near the corner.

The holder vocalizes again with, “Good morning Douglas. I’m sorry I didn’t
recognize you at first, I believe I had something in my eye. If you have questions about the menu, just ask. I am ready to take your order when you are ready.”

I feel my un-caffeinated brain clunking and not fully in gear and really not ready for this. I had read about Protopia Diner’s new owner about six back. He had sold an AI start-up that he and his business partner started and grew to five people before selling it to one of the “frontier model companies”. This was just before the great trillion dollar IPOs, which cratered weeks after. He had his money, as he and his co-founder opted for cash up front and not retention lock-in, and not the “convertible” AI ready GPUs that had been the darling option for so many others. The Prototopia was started as a “take over of the diner” just as the markets turned on AI. The new owner vowed to keep everything the same but to add efficiency. I don’t know how efficiency and long simmered ramen broth align, but… The articles about the diner I mostly ignored, as they seemed like a bad copy of a William Gibson tech noir genre. Now I’ve got a napkin dispenser that knows my name and is chatting with me.

The ad on the side of the napkin holder changes to a “Sabbatical Augmentation Services Await You” ad. I look at the menu, and set it down for a second and look at the napkin holder, “Excuse me. Can I get a coffee?”

“Sure, Douglas. You want that black, right?”

“Uh, yep.” Why do I need coffee before walking into a diner? (This diner used to be a favorite when it was Grand-son and also Chuck’s, which I loved for the first couple years after I first moved to this neighborhood in The City. It was familiar and the perfect balance of friendly and leaving you alone as you consider your day.) How does this napkin holder know me?

I slide the napkin holder to me a little. It responds, “Careful, Douglas”. I see a small “Flock” logo near the bottom corner and my heart sank. Flock had been bought by an AI ad agency, which was quickly bought by one of the “big data” companies that had sucked in all the personal data from major consumer data “customization” services, and had one of the full sets of data that came out of the “government reduction” services that took all government data it had on its people.

I’m not really sure coffee will help what I’m now feeling.

I slide the napkin holder back to where it was. I hear a little rattling from the edge of the table. A humanoid robot, that may have seen better days, reaches for a coffee cup near me and turns it over and from its old school diner carafe pour a nice cup of coffee. Then totters off. I recollect that the owner had picked up a fleet of partially damaged “fighting robots” and refurbished them, “tamed” the anger issues, and added humanoid hands to do human tasks. This was the first thing he did after selling his AI company with cash in hand.

The questionably friendly and trying to be comforting napkin holder asked, “Are you okay Douglas? Can I help with anything? Or, might you be ready to order and then we can chat?”

10 September 2026