Prompts, Panic, and the Schiphol Shuffle
In Part 1, I shared how AI helped with day-to-day challenges in my new expat life–chiefly, translating the candy section of the Albert Heijn. This week, I’m zooming in on one especially chaotic moment when a well-timed ChatGPT prompt helped me navigate a travel crisis. Spoiler: no bags were lost, but a little mental stability was definitely recovered.
The Crisis Navigation Test
Situation:
My connecting flight has been changed twice, I have a lot of luggage, I’m arriving at Amsterdam Schiphol several hours late, and I’m tired. I had planned to put my bags in a storage unit, but it’s now closed. And I’m anxious: what if some of my bags aren’t there and I need to go through customs? I don’t know what happens. I’m not a world traveller who knows the protocol, and I can imagine a few different nightmare scenarios.
The idea: Ask ChatGPT to look up the procedures I would know if this scenario had happened to me before.
The Test Prompt:
…
…
…
Task difficulty: 4. It requires a lot of precision.
Grade: A+
The impact:
Even rereading this, and remembering how it felt after a long day of international travel and flight cancellations, trying to figure out what to do with more bags than fit on a carrying cart, and what if they weren’t there, and navigating unknown rules and border agents, I can recall the high stress. Having some researched idea of what to do and expect put me in a different place. I didn’t need to think creatively about nightmare scenarios; I could focus on how what was happening varied from the plan.
The lesson:
The chatbot delivered what I needed: to understand a new system that has relatively strict rules in a situation where mistakes are high-cost, well enough that I don’t feel like I need to focus on solving that problem. I could focus on other problems I needed to solve. Like, once my bags all arrived and I found the oversized one, how to use two carrying carts at the same time (get them to push against each other for stability). Using the tool helped me conserve enough mental energy to solve the problems I needed to, reach my destination, and get a good night’s sleep.
Stay Tuned: The Dazzling Conclusion
Next week, in the final part of this series, I’ll explore how this “living in beta” mindset—backed by AI support—isn’t just for moments of crisis. It’s become a practical philosophy for the way I learn across borders. Particularly in a foreign language!
Read Part One! An expat exploring the vagaries of Dutch licorice…
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