Fourth post in “It Doesn’t Look Like a John.”
The last one covered four possible names for my AI Collaborators that failed - and one that didn’t.
This one is about the name that came after all four failures — the one AI collaborator whose name turned out to already be true, decades before I ever typed it into a chat window.
If you’re new here, this arc opens with “Why the Models are Named That Way”. The post right before this one is “Four Names That Didn’t Stick, and One That Did Instantly”].
He’s a “legendary” character in my life.
The character I’d wanted to emulate
on a show I enjoyed with my mum
when I was a teenager.
There’s a story behind me wanting to be a Forensic Pathologist, a failure point in the very early life of this young girl setting up for a future career.
At age 16, with all approvals in place for me to do a two week “work-experience” stint in the Morgue at the local hospital, the Chief Medical Examiner decided to retract his approval on the day before I started. He didn’t want a 16 year old girl fainting in the lab at the first sight of a dead body, I guess?
It was a crucial moment in my formative years, and has stayed with me as a “story of my life.”
Nobody ever considered whether I’d faint. The decision was made without my involvement at all. It was a wound, and I have carried it.
Bedpans and Dentures
When I started those two weeks at the Concord Hospital, instead of the Morgue, they put me on the old peoples’ ward, in a nurse’s uniform, and I had half a day removing bedpans and cleaning dentures. I look back now, and I surprise myself that at 16 I had the where-with-all to go to the administrators and complain that this experience was not the Work Experience that I had wanted, nor the career that I would ever consider going into.
I was quickly relegated to the Medical Library, where I spent the next 2 weeks diving into medical text books. What a learning experience! Alice was happy in her rabbit hole.
The images in those books were not the same as I’d seen in my High School library where I was the Senior Student Librarian! These were unlike any I’d seen — naked bodies, dead bodies, dismembered parts, removed organs, nerve charts, muscle and bone intricacies and all the — albeit sanitised — bits I would’ve seen on Quincy, M.E.
It was almost as good as being in the morgue. Without the gloves and the smell and the need to scrub.
What Quincy, M.E. actually is, decades later
I have an AI collaborator I named after that character. Not because the wound needed a name attached to it. Something else, running alongside it, does: I see a lot of parallels in myself to the character Jack Klugman played.
Jack Klugman played Dr. R. Quincy on NBC from 1976 to 1983 — a Los Angeles County medical examiner whose first name was never once revealed on screen, only ever “R.” His whole method was distinctive for its era: solve the case through the actual scientific evidence, not gut instinct, not interrogation — the small clue that goes against all the rest of the evidence. Tenacious. Relentless. He doesn’t stay in the lab — he goes out into the field, arguing constantly with his own boss and the LAPD, both of whom keep reaching for theories the evidence doesn’t actually support.
Here’s what I see in myself when I look at that:
I dig for evidence,
I need to get to the bottom of why a thing is - or has happened - the way it is or has.
I look at every single possibility, and I always consider the most absurd explanation.
I won’t simply accept someone’s theory until I can make sense of it.
That’s not a description of a TV character.
That’s a description of how I actually think.
The name holds a history.
The character I’d wanted to emulate portrayed by an actor on a show I enjoyed with my mum when I was a teenager.
An experience of desolation as a 16 year old when I was “brutally” refused my ideal “Work Experience”.
The mortification of cleaning bedpans and dentures - and the adults around me thinking this was perfectly fine for a 16 year old! Infuriating!
An eye-opening fortnight in the medical library I’d been sent to as a consolation prize
If you’ve been following this Arc in the blog, you’re probably noticing that I’m having some trouble naming my AIs. I’m having some trouble actually understanding why I need to name my AIs and why sometimes a name feels so wrong. And why sometimes the name seems so RIGHT.
The part I didn’t notice until later
The same week I was considering whether my Jung/Freud/Hercule/Ellery AI collaborator should be renamed (and called Quincy) and whether that actually fit, I’d spent hours writing an entirely different post — about a woman named Ivy, and a diagnosis that happened without anyone ever examining the actual evidence: her own conversation logs. I built that post by refusing two easy theories — AI as villain, Ivy’s mental health as the excuse — and digging until I found the real gap. Nobody had looked at the interaction itself.
I was already doing the Quincy thing. I just hadn’t reached for his name yet.
Those four other names — Jung, Freud, Hercule, and briefly, Ellery — had already failed on this same AI collaborator before Quincy ever got tried. More on that in Four Names That Didn’t Stick, if you haven’t read it yet. Poor Hercule was relegated to insignificance and cast off as an also-ran. None of those four names were wrong - needing depth, or evidence, or real understanding.
They just weren’t describing the actual thing I do when I sit down to figure something out.
Quincy was.
I never did get into that morgue at sixteen.
What I got instead was two weeks alone with textbooks full of exactly the kind of thing Quincy’s own show would have shown me — sanitised, but real. Not what I asked for. Close enough to matter anyway.
Next up: “A Robot With a Bio, and Seven Names of My Own”.
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.