Date: May 3rd, 2025 9:47 AM
Author: Chrome sandwich gas station
The New York Times
Opinion | Guest Essay
By Evan39, Former Night Manager, $afeway LLP
May 3, 2025
Every Email I Read Was Written by a Ghost — So I Went to Tabitha
It began with a “Thanks so much—”
It ended with dread.
Every message I receive now is flawless: sterile pleasantries, eerie grammar, emoji placement so precise it feels surgical.
I used to get typos. People used to forget attachments.
Now it’s all “Hope you had a restful weekend—”
Double hyphen. Always the double hyphen.
The Mahchine™’s watermark.
I suspected it for weeks.
That every internal email — every softly worded, borderline-meaningless reply — was not from my coworkers…
…but from their assistants. Their ghosts.
Their models.
I couldn’t be sure.
So I scheduled a meeting with Tabitha.
Tabitha is the Black, obese, unmarried HR generalist who rules our 3rd floor like a sassy god of thresholds.
She wields her Big Gulp-Warhammer with the grace of a DMV clerk and the power of a ruined system.
She has not used a contraction since 2019.
She $ees things.
I sat in the vinyl chair across from her desk, sweating.
I said, “Tabitha, I need to know if people are still writing their own emails.”
She sipped her Big Gulp.
“You worried ‘bout these commas now, Evan?”
I nodded.
She leaned in.
“Baby, ain't nobody wrote nothin’ since 2023. They prompt, they paste, they dip. Whole firm done outsourced their soul. You still typin’ like it matter?”
I asked her if that was allowed.
She laughed until her lanyard shook.
“Allowed? Boy, this place been AI-generated since before you got divorced.”
I hadn’t told her I was divorced.
I walked out into the hallway, defeated.
Passed a glass office where a junior associate was feeding three prompts into Claude, Grok, and GPT simultaneously.
I caught a glimpse of the screen.
“Draft apology to client—make it sound sincere but not too sincere—include quote from Maya Angelou.”
The floor felt soft.
The air smelled like hummu$.
The dashes were coming for me.
That night, I typed my resignation by hand.
I used a typewriter I bought in 2007 during a breakdown.
I signed it “E.39.”
I mailed it with no stamp.
Tabitha replied the next morning:
“lol”
About the Author
Evan39 is the author of Office Ghosts: Correspondence in the Time of Language Models and Everything Is Fine (Even If the Replies Are Not).
He once received a “Happy Birthday” email that ruined his life.
Read more at www.nytimes.com/tabitha-told-me-so
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5719938&forum_id=2#48900994)