No one wants to call the support line.

It sucks to call the support line and get someone with an impenetrable Indian accent and immediately think, Oh fuck. Because that’s racist. If you have the burden of being a liberal, you feel more racist every time you ask them to repeat themselves. And also stupid. You call a support line for support, not another opportunity to feel racist and stupid.

At the heart of it, you’ve had too much experience to have any faith that anyone in Support is going to solve your problem, and you might feel stupider and more racist to boot. So you put it off, if you can manage without it. Maybe there’s a neighbor. Not the kind of neighbor who will tell you what to do. The kind who will come in and do it while you stand behind and say “Oh my” and “Gracious you’re fast” and “Aren’t you just something. Would you like a hard candy?”

But last week I had to call my internet provider. And by “call” I mean navigate a self-help maze online until I reach the end and answer the “Did this solve the problem?” by writing “No” and being bounced back to the beginning of the maze again. But there was a chat box hiding in the bottom corner. With a robot. The robot had a lot of the same suggestions I’d already fruitlessly explored. You have to tire out the robot—they’re almost indefatigable, but you can fatigate them eventually—and then you can wait for a human.

My first human was Carter.

Now the relationship-building begins. I had in mind I would explain my problem and we’d go from there. Carter thought it was important to build my confidence first. “I am going to do everything I can to own your experience today,” Carter typed. Really? I explained I couldn’t get on a website even though my WiFi was of the opinion it was working just fine. Carter reiterated he was going to own my experience if I would give him a minute, so I did. He came back and said there was an Outage but they were on it and they estimated it would be fixed by 10:00am. I said thanks and he signed off.

It was 9:58am on a Thursday.

Nothing happened. On Sunday I tried the chatbox again. Coincidentally, my new guy Sahiv also opened by saying he was going to own my experience. I said Good, because Carter had taken it and fenced it in the alley for pennies on the dollar.

Sahiv wasn’t concerned about my Outage. He had me do a factory reset on my modem with a paper clip. It worked great. It occurred to me to ask if there was somewhere on Carter I could jam a paper clip but I had more support to get, this time from Apple.

They had a chat robot too! The chat robot wanted to know how I was doing today. I said I was fine and typed in my problem as briefly as I could manage. The chat person said “I can relate. I also use the App store a lot and I would feel terrible without it. Let me see what I can do to solve this terrible problem for you. Life is too short for these worries, isn’t it?” I told him it was getting shorter all the time.

Is this normal business now? Are we so starved for human contact that we need to be soothed by robots? Is this an emotional support line? If so, I’m holding out for a droid that will ask me how my tomato plants are coming along and inquire about my cat. I ditched the robot in favor of calling tech support. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel like I was being rude, hanging up on the robot. That’s what they’ve done to me.

Calling Apple Support turned out to be a rare delight. My human understood my problem, took over my screen, showed me what to tap on, and my problem was solved. Apple went into the alley and paid the ransom on my experience and gave it back to me. And lo, it was very good.