From The Editor’s Desk: Seeking A Little Expertise ⭐

Our daughter totaled her car recently. She’s fine, but like many Americans, she literally needs a car, if only to get to work every day. And so this set off a flurry of activity, complicated by my wife and me being in Mexico at the time. But it wasn’t just that. As I mentioned in What I Use: Mexico, September to November 2025 ⭐, we had benefited from a relationship with a man named Ali who owned a car repair business in our area of Pennsylvania. Ali was instrumental in helping us with all my family’s cars, including the car Kelly just totaled. But Ali passed away almost a year ago.

I feel this loss personally because Ali was one of those special people I always loved seeing and spending time with. But I also felt it on a different level when we learned about Kelly’s car accident. We’re in Mexico, she’s in North Carolina, and Ali is gone. How on earth were we going to figure this out, and quickly, without him? He would have shown up for us. He would have come through for us. That’s who he was.

Looking past the personal element, what we were missing was Ali’s expertise.

As any adult can tell you, especially if they own a home or a business, finding people you can trust is crucial. If you’re a home owner, these people should include a carpenter, electrician, or plumber, for example. We had the absolute best of each when we were still living in Massachusetts, we’ve done pretty well in Pennsylvania, and we even found a guy here in Mexico, through a neighbor in the building, who is a truly skilled Jack of all trades.

For Kelly’s next car, we muddled through it and everything seems to have worked out. Kelly found a used Toyota RAV4 that we had inspected by a local mechanic there, and she seems to like it quite a bit. Ali had practically begged us to trade-in our old BMW, many times, for a Honda or Toyota because the parts for our car are so expensive and often take a long time to obtain. It was why Kelly and our son Mark both had Hondas. And it was why Kelly ended up with a Toyota: Ali may be gone, but his expertise lives on in this small way because we remember his advice and often talk about this. He was the expert. We trusted his expertise. And we may never really replace him.

In my tech-adjacent field, there are experts, there are pretenders, and there are those who have just given up, replacing valuable how-to content with advertising that’s not even thinly veiled anymore. The world is circling the drain in so many ways, and I keep one eye on the calendar, wondering when I will cross some line where the horrible crap all around me just doesn’t matter anymore. I’m not there yet, and I hope I never am. But this is a battle of wills and the deck is stacked against me.

In some ways, subject matter experts are a dime a dozen if you only focus on that single thing they understand better than most. But the truly special people are those who have a unique set of skills, like being able to communicate t...

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