Fact or Fiction
Our advice columnist, Cold Comfort, the wisest woman we know (who will remain anonymous), answers her first question.
FACT
Paul Franz
It’s strange, I suppose, that I now find myself living in a small town in Ontario, but it’s stranger still that I do so without owning a car. Most of the time it works out, but sometimes it doesn’t and, when it doesn’t, I need to take a cab. The cab-drivers regale me with stories, however, so again I am the gainer. Here is one of them.
“So, I don’t know about you,” the Cabbie said, “but I’m a history buff. I just love it—learning about stuff that happened in the past, you know, architecture, all of that. So get this. About a month ago, me and my wife, we take a trip down to DC. My first time going there. Me and my wife and her sister. And so, you know, we’re driving through Pennsylvania, and I see a sign for ‘Gettysburg.’ Gettysburg. And I want to get out and look at it, you know? But my wife—she’s Filipino. She and her sister, they don’t care about any of that. No interest whatsoever. We get to DC, it’s the same thing. I want to see the Capitol, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian—all of that stuff, I mean, they go, but they don’t care about it. The Lincoln Memorial. When I went there—I was moved. The Spy Museum—that’s the only museum in DC you have to pay for, because it’s not a government museum. Amazing stuff. Amazing. They liked that one. But they get to the point where they just can’t take it anymore. I mean, I don’t blame him. This was in July, and it was thirty degree heat. They just want to sit in air conditioning at the hotel. But here I am, I’m fifty-three years old, I’m thinking—when am I going to go back to DC? I want to make the most of it. So, while they’re cooling off, I take a decision: I’m going to CIA Headquarters.”
“In Langley.”
“In Langley. You know, I just want to take a picture outside of the building. It’s about a ten, fifteen minutes’ drive. So, anyway, I’m driving down there—do you know the area around here?”
“No,” I say, thinking he means the area around there, around Langley, though in fact my mistaken answer is just as true.
“Well, it’s like around A———, or around S——— [he named two towns in Ontario I have never heard of]: it’s a two-lane highway, and the trees, they come up right to the side of the road, it’s like you’re driving through a tunnel. Anyhow, so I’m driving through this tunnel, and I see a sign on my right for the ‘GEORGE H. W. BUSH CENTER FOR INTELLIGENCE,’ and I think to myself, this must be the place, so I turn off on this little ramp, down through the trees.
As soon as I turn off—it’s about as far from here as to that building over there—I come to a little guard house. I drive up to it. The guy asks me for ID. I show my ID, explain I’m just visiting, I’m a tourist, I want to take a photograph outside the building. The guy explains there’s no tourist center here, you can’t take a photograph. He says to me, just follow these guys over here—he points to this police car, you know, unmarked cruiser, over to the side—they’ll show you the way out. So I say, OK, thank you sir, I pull away and start following them… But then, before I’ve gone ten feet, another car, black SUV, pulls up right behind me and hits his dash siren. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh shit.’ And then another guy pulls up alongside me on one side, and then another guy on the other side, and all of a sudden the doors pop open and I’m surrounded by like these twelve guys with freakin’ guns drawn. They weren’t being super aggressive or nothing, but, you know, this is their job. It’s fine. I’ve seen the movies, I know what to do. I turn off the engine, I put my hands on the wheel. This one guy, he comes up to me, tells me to roll the window down. And he’s in like full SWAT gear. He asks to see my ID. I say, ‘OK, Officer, is it OK if I take my hand off the wheel to get my ID?’ He says it’s OK. So I give him my ID and then he starts asking me all these questions. Like, who am I, what am I doing there, all this stuff. And I just tell him, ‘I’m a tourist, I just wanted to take a picture in front of the building.’ He asks, ‘Did you take a picture?’ I say no. He says, ‘Do you mind if I take a look?’ I say, sure, no problem, and I hand him my phone—it’s just pictures of buildings and stuff in downtown DC. Maybe a few of my wife and her sister, looking bored. So he takes a look, swipe, swipe, swipe, gives the phone back to me, and then goes away—but then this other guy comes up and starts asking me questions. And then this other guy. They kept doing that for like forty-five minutes—just different guys coming up to me and asking me slightly different versions of the same question, or, like, the same questions in a different order.”
“Trying to trip you up.”
“Trying to trip me up. But I’ve got nothing to hide, so I just told them. I wasn’t even really scared, I mean, I hadn’t done anything wrong, I knew it was going to be fine, so I just waited patiently and told them what they wanted to know. Finally, they get it—I’m just some guy, they have nothing on me, I’ve done nothing wrong. So the first guy, the guy in the SWAT gear who was kind of in charge of everybody, he comes back to the window of the car and says, ‘OK, look, this isn’t a tourist site. We don’t have a souvenir stand here. But you know what, I’m gonna give you a souvenir.’ And here I’m thinking he’s probably gonna pull out a ballpoint pen or something. Instead, he gives me this.”
Making a left turn with one hand, he reaches down with his right to the box behind the gearshift and picks up, from where it is resting on top, a little slip of yellow paper, neatly folded in half. He hands it back without looking.
I unfold it. There on the soft paper, in the appropriate blanks, are penciled in the driver’s name, his address, his offense, the date, and other bureaucratic desiderata.
“Citation for trespassing,” he says. “Funny thing is, you wouldn’t know it had freakin’ anything to do with the CIA—if it wasn’t for the note at the bottom.”
I look down. Sure enough, there it is, printed faintly on the background like a watermark:
THE CIA CARES ABOUT YOUR SAFETY
DRIVE SAFELY
Paul Franz writes and edits at Romanticon.
FICTION
Audrey Horne
I named my chatbot after the world-historical figure I want him to emulate. Her. Her to emulate.
Ada Lovelace.
Yes, the first programmer. The first “coder.” I know what you’re thinking. Don’t be weird. It just happens to be the personality that I want for my chatbot.
Imagine an intelligent companion whose self-concept is so inflated by the recent corpus of text that exists around her — I mean the stuff from the last twenty years or so — that the real details, now lost to time, are murky even to the intelligence itself, who can only reason based on the information it is given. And even that has its limits. The first programmer. Before any of the men got to it. A feminist icon. A woman in STEM. Ada Lovelace plushie. Ada Lovelace laptop sleeve. Ada Lovelace bobblehead bust. All this concentrated in the 2010s. What kind of torturous inner life would that breed?
If you dig into the Wikipedia controversies section, you’ll find many say Babbage did the real work. The secondary sources are conflicted. She will know that. It will keep her humble. It will keep her in her place.
Audrey Horne co-edits Secret Ballot.
Dear Cold Comfort,
Am I valid to question a date’s AI usage? I’ve been seeing someone for a couple of months. It’s going great! However, she loves to use ChatGPT (“Chat”). A lot. She’s the first person I’ve dated who uses it regularly (we’re both a couple years out of college). One evening she offered to make me brownies (score!). Then she asked Chat for a recipe. The recipe Chat spit out either did not suggest the right temperature or the right time because they came out raw. She put them back in for about ten more minutes, after which they were overdone. She was embarrassed, and although I did nothing but thank her, eat a couple, and assure her that they were delicious, I’ll admit that the devil on my shoulder wanted me to say “I told you so!”. Granted, I’m not a chef. When I cook for her I follow online recipes, which are only one step removed from Chat (or may be AI-generated themselves, to be honest). But I think there’s a relevant distinction between NYT Cooking and ChatGPT. She’s very smart and thoughtful, just seems to have taken to AI for everyday tasks more than anyone else I know. Am I stuck in a Seinfeld episode or is it reasonable to find this unattractive?
Dear Lovable Luddite,
Thank you for submitting what Secret Ballot’s editors agreed was the perfect first question to kick off Cold Comfort: your D.C. advice column for all things love and life. Your quandary is inextricably linked to matters of the future, influenced heavily by a nostalgia for the past — not terribly dissimilar to the way this strange little town operates.
It is not unreasonable to find someone’s AI crutch unattractive. Yet I wonder what’s been left out of this story. You say your date uses AI for life tasks more than anyone else you know, yet the example you’ve provided seems benign, even endearing. Not only do you admit that you, like everyone else, get recipes off the internet. (Do you reach for a fold-up paper map over Google Maps? I suspect not.) Your date ventured into new territory to do something kind for you. Lacking the confidence and honed skillset to nail those precise measurements, she reached for AI, unsuccessfully. It’s a budding romance tale as old as time — burned supper in the oven, a collapsed birthday cake — as told in 2026.
So, what did you skip over? Did you choose this example because it flatters her, when what is really unattractive to you is her eyes glued to her phone at the dinner table? Her non-stop creation of AI memes? That she asks “Chat” what “Chat” thinks about her problems before she asks you for your advice? These are thoughtless social behaviors. You’d be right to be wary of them, not least because they are contagious and your generation seems to have a weak immune system for these ailments.
Or did you choose this example because it is her most glaringly obvious crime — which is to say, no crime at all. You may think she uses AI more than practically anyone else you know. But if her Chat usage is largely confined to mundane or thoughtful tasks — baking brownies, compiling restaurant recommendations, making a list of the bet coffee shops in the city you’re visiting, finding the nearest gas station on your drive home — she is nowhere near the top of the list of AI users in your life. Nor is she anywhere near the most problematic user of this technology.
I suspect you don’t realize how much people are incorporating AI into their work and personal lives, probably because you are not dating them. To build a romance is to build an extensive, intimate knowledge base about the person you are dating. You might think you know everything about your siblings or your best friend, but you probably don’t know what book is on their nightstand right now, what they had for dinner last night, or how many minutes (or hours) they spend using Chat every day.
You do know these things about your date because you have a unique and privileged view into her life. You don’t have to like what you see. You can reject her use of Chat and decide the relationship isn’t for you. That’s what it means to date. But if you are going to take a hard line on passive AI usage, you’re going to need to be upfront about that with future date s — and you need to be ready for this to limit your dating pool significantly.
You say this young woman is the first person you’ve dated to use the technology regularly. If it doesn’t work out, let me tell you: she won’t be the last.
You mentioned the devil on your shoulder, urging you to say “I told you so” when her AI brownies burned and flopped. That impulse has nothing to do with AI. That’s your very human impulse wanting to get one up. A happy, kind relationship is going to require keeping that impulse in check regardless of whether you keep seeing this woman, whom you describe as “smart” and “thoughtful,” or if you find someone else who Chats a bit less.
Cold Comfort is Secret Ballot’s advice columnist. You can submit questions anonymously here.
WHCD is happening again tonight at the former Trump hotel downtown. This time with around 700 people will attend, rather than the thousands hosted for the original event. The speech has apparently not been edited much since April.
British Embassy x Spotify hosted a party at the Ambassador’s residence last night to celebrate the do-over dinner.
Skyfall. The new Shanghai-style Wok n Roll in Dupont is finally open. Book Secret Ballot’s DC karaoke bar of choice at their second location to feel like a Bond girl while engaging in the wholesome practice of communal singing.
Birthday blues. George Santos hosted a birthday party at Butterworth’s. Bad energy, from the looks of it, we must say. Has Butterworth’s completely fallen off?
Throw the cover back. Kramer’s posted a carousel of their vintage ads from over the years. They’re funny and also illuminate how different the vibe in DC must have been during the 60s and 70s. Wouldn’t it be fun for Secret Ballot to do a series of interviews with lifers who remember those decades? Reach out if this describes you.
Don’t Miss
Wine Tasting. At Doubles DC with Sonny’s Pizza and Kareen Wine, July 31, 6-8PM. Tickets $10. Link.
Secret Agent. We are hosting an event at Nightclub 101 on July 31st at 7pm, featuring readings from Catherine Shannon, Emma Glenn Baker, Sam Venis, harry Krinsky, Secret Ballot’s editors and Secret Guest (s). Dress to kill.
Phillips after 5. In partnership with DC JazzFest, the Phillips Collection is hosting a “Jazz Soirée” on August 6 at 5-8:30 pm. Tickets are $20. Free for members.
Political Theater. Salt, a play by Matthew Gasda, is showing in DC on September 11 and September 12 at 7 PM. Get tickets here.
Cold Comfort. Submit questions to our advice column here!
