I have been writing here for a long time about machines that act before they ask.
I never told you where I learned it.
In February of 2003 I sent an email to my plant manager. I had worked at that plant since 1977. Twenty-six years. I told him some men in the garage were stealing.
He took it to my supervisor. My supervisor walked back to the garage and told the men what I had said. He told them to watch their backs around me.
The next morning nobody picked me up for the ride out. I walked.
At lunch I found out why.
That afternoon I was up in the quarry driving a fuel truck. I called the garage on the radio for help with a piece of equipment. Nobody answered. I called again. Nothing.
I want you to understand what that means. You are alone in a quarry in a heavy truck and the men who are supposed to answer you have decided not to. That is not a hurt feeling. That is a safety condition.
I came down and asked for time off. I was told no.
That was the last day I ever worked there.
I got sick after that. I was under a doctor’s care. I filed a claim. I brought the company the paperwork I had.
The company decided the paperwork was wrong.
Now here is the part that matters.
My wife called them back. Twice. She told them they could talk to her. They could talk to my doctor. They could talk to my attorney. Three people, standing there, ready to answer any question they had.
The company called none of them.
They sent me a letter instead. Then they sent me another one. On April 15, 2003, that second letter said I was terminated because my paperwork was insufficient.
They had the questions. They had the phone numbers. They never picked up the phone. They just decided.
We sued. The trial court threw it out.
Then on May 10, 2007, the California Court of Appeal took it back up and reversed. Second Appellate District, Division 3. Faust v. California Portland Cement Co., 150 Cal.App.4th 864.
That is my name on it. Michael Faust. I am the Faust in that case.
The court said something plain. When an employer has facts in front of it that suggest a man may need protected leave, that employer is obligated to inquire further. The employee does not have to know the law. He does not have to say the right words. He does not have to guess at the form.
The one holding the power has to ask.
The case settled in 2008. Five years from that February morning. Vicki and I were on food stamps for a long stretch of it. I am not going to dress that up. It was hard, and she carried as much of it as I did.
But here is what came out of it.
That decision is not sitting in a drawer. Two hundred twenty-nine California and federal court decisions have cited it. In 2011 the State of California cited my case by name in its own legislative summary, explaining why the Legislature was amending the law. Lawyers were still citing it in their practice guides this year.
I did not know that until this week. I never went looking.
Now here is why I am telling you.
For eighteen months I have been building a framework for how an AI should conduct itself. People ask me where the ideas come from. They assume I read them somewhere.
One of the rules in it says the machine has to check the source of what it is handed before it acts on it. Another says it has to name the gap instead of filling the hole with a guess. Another says when something arrives with no instruction attached, it asks. It does not assume.
That is the same rule.
A California court wrote it into employment law because of what happened to me at a cement plant in 2003. I wrote it into a governance file in 2026 because machines are now doing to people what that company did to me.
Deciding without asking. Acting on the paperwork in front of them and never calling the three people standing there with the answer.
I did not get that idea from a book. I got it from five years of my life.
The court called it a duty to inquire. I call it the plainest thing there is. If you have the power and you have the question, you ask before you act.
That is the whole thing. It cost me my job to learn it and it cost my wife five years to hold the line with me while I proved it.
You can read the case yourself. Faust v. California Portland Cement Co. (2007) 150 Cal.App.4th 864. It is free on FindLaw and on Justia.
Nobody is going to write it down for you.
Michael S. Faust Sr.
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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