The Learner Who Found Me Through a Machine, Not a Neighbour

How people used to find me

For most of my working life, the way somebody came to sit in my little white Corsa was simple. Somebody's cousin had passed. Somebody's aunty had heard I was patient with nervous people. A woman would stop me at the Shoprite in Polokwane and say, my daughter is terrified of the hill by the taxi rank, can you take her, and I would say bring her Tuesday at four, and that was that.

I never advertised. Not once in twenty-two years. My name travelled the way rain travels, from one roof to the next, and I trusted it the way you trust a road you have driven ten thousand times. My husband used to tease me. He would say, other people have a business, you have a rumour. And he was right, and it worked, and I was proud of it in a quiet way I never said out loud.

I taught schoolchildren the year before matric. I taught grandmothers who had let their husbands drive for forty years and were suddenly widows with a car in the yard and no idea how to reverse it. I taught a blind man's son so the boy could take his father to dialysis. I know the clutch of that Corsa better than I know my own hands now, and I know the exact place on the R81 where a learner's courage usually breaks, and how to talk them through it without them ever noticing I did anything at all.

So when the phone went quiet, I did not understand it at first. I thought it was the time of year. I thought maybe people had less money, which is always true. I thought maybe I had become the old lady the young ones were shy to call.

The quiet that did not make sense

It was not one bad month. It was four. My diary, which for years had been a mess of names crossed out and squeezed in, started to look like a page somebody had wiped clean. I would sit at the kitchen table on a Sunday night with my pen and there would be nothing to write.

I told my son Kabelo about it when he came for lunch. He works with computers in Pretoria, the kind of work I have never fully understood, and I only mentioned it the way you mention a sore knee, not expecting anything. I said, the young people just are not coming anymore, maybe I have had my time.

He put down his fork. He asked me a question I did not expect. He said, Ma, when last did somebody find you who did not already know your name.

I could not answer him. Because when I thought about it properly, every single new learner in the last two years had come from someone who already knew me. The rumour was still working. But the rumour only reaches so far, and it was getting old with me, and there was a whole generation underneath it who did not look for a driving instructor the way their mothers had.

What Kabelo showed me on his phone

He did something then that changed the shape of the problem for me. He took out his phone and he typed a question into it, the way you would ask a person. He asked it, out loud as he typed, where can I learn to drive in Polokwane, someone patient, good with nervous learners.

And the phone answered him. Not with a list of blue links like the old days, which I barely understood either. It answered him in full sentences, like a knowledgeable neighbour would, naming three driving schools and saying a little about each one. Recommending them. Speaking about them with confidence.

I was not on it. Two of the three I had never even heard of. One of them I know is not half as careful as they should be, and there they were, being described to my son as if they were the safest hands in Limpopo.

I sat with that for a long time. Because this was exactly the thing I had always relied on, a trusted voice telling a stranger who to go to. Except the voice was no longer a person at the Shoprite. The voice was a machine, and the machine had never heard of me, and so as far as this new world was concerned, I did not exist.

Kabelo was gentle about it. He said this whole business of getting a machine to know you and mention you when people ask, there is a name for it now, people call it answer engine optimisation, and it is becoming as normal as having a sign on your gate used to be. He said the old way of chasing the top of a search page was changing into something else, where you want the answer itself to say your name.

Learning something new at fifty-eight

I will be honest, my first feeling was tiredness. I am fifty-eight. I have spent my life learning the things that mattered to my work, the biting point, the blind spot, the exact tone of voice that keeps a shaking eighteen-year-old from stalling at a robot with a taxi behind her. I did not want a new subject.

But then I thought about the blind man's son, and the widows, and all the people who still needed what I do and were now being handed to strangers by a machine that spoke so surely. And I thought, it is not vanity to want to be found. It is the only way the work continues.

Kabelo spent a Saturday with me at the kitchen table. He explained that these machines learn from what is written about you in plenty of places across the internet, in your own words and in other people's, and that if almost nothing is written, the machine has nothing to repeat. My problem was not that I was bad. My problem was that I was invisible to the thing now doing the recommending. He said some people try to sort this themselves, and some hand it to a company that does what folk are starting to call AI SEO services, which is really just the patient, unglamorous work of making sure the honest facts about you exist where a machine can find them.

We started small. We wrote down, properly, in plain words, what I actually do. Twenty-two years. Nervous learners a speciality. The area I cover. The hill by the taxi rank that I have made peace with a thousand times. Kabelo put it in a few of the right places online and asked three of my old learners, now grown with children of their own, to write a few honest sentences about their lessons with me. Not flattery. Just the truth, in their voices.

The girl who found me the new way

It took some weeks. Then in the middle of a Wednesday my phone rang with a number I did not know, which had not happened in months.

A young woman. Twenty, maybe. She said, is this the lady who teaches nervous people, and I said it is, and she said, I asked on my phone and it told me about you, it said you are patient.

I nearly cried, standing there in my kitchen with the kettle going. Not because of the machine. Because after four silent months, a stranger had found her way to me again, the way strangers always used to, except the neighbour who sent her was made of electricity now.

She was terrified, that girl. Worse than most. Her hands shook so badly the first lesson that we did not even leave the yard. By the fourth lesson she took the hill without me saying a word, and she did not even notice she had done it, which is the whole art of the thing. She passed in November. She sent me a photo of her licence, and underneath it she wrote, thank you for being patient with me, exactly the words the machine had used, and I do not think she even knew.

What I understand now

I am not going to pretend I turned into a technical person. I did not. Kabelo eventually helped me talk to a small AEO agency to keep it ticking over, because he has his own life in Pretoria and I would rather spend my hours in the Corsa than at a screen, and that suits me. The rumour still runs, the aunties still stop me at the Shoprite, and I am glad of it. That will never stop being how I most love to be found.

But I understand the new neighbour now. When somebody sits in my car these days and I ask how they heard of me, roughly half still say a cousin or a colleague. And roughly half say, my phone told me. I no longer flinch at that. A recommendation is a recommendation, whether it comes from a woman at the till or a machine in a pocket, and either way there is a frightened person in my passenger seat who needs someone patient, and that part has not changed in twenty-two years, and I do not think it ever will.