Mum recently decided to help Jo protect her garden from the possums that had been treating it as their own private salad bar.
She did some research, put up bird netting and spent quite a bit of time trying to make the garden less accessible to the little night-time thieves.
The possums, naturally, took this as a challenge.
By the next morning, they had apparently found a way around Mum’s defences and carried on as usual.
Then came the second part of the story. Jo, without having gone outside to inspect Mum’s handiwork, passed on some advice from ChatGPT about what Mum could have done differently.
This did not go down especially well.
Mum had done the research, bought the materials and tackled the job herself, so receiving computer-generated advice afterwards was perhaps not the response she had been hoping for.
Jo, I suspect, thought she was simply being helpful. Mum felt rather less enthusiastic about the whole experience.
I found myself somewhere in the middle, feeling sorry for Mum, amused by the persistence of the possums, and reminded once again that helping family can be a funny mixture of love, effort, frustration and good intentions.
For now, I think the possums are winning.