Take Me to Your Leader

The Battle of the Chat Support Bots

In 2019, I started a Wordpress blog called the Misfit Farmer on which I amassed quite a collection of sparsely read verbiage. It often felt like I was blogging into the wind, so a year or so ago I decided to experiment with a Substack newsletter, in an attempt to bring my verbiage to the masses. For the last year, I have double posted my weekly missives on both Wordpress and Substack. Unfortunately, the mass readership thing still hasn’t panned out, but I have come to the realization that Substack is a lot easier to use.

Last week, I finally decided to discontinue my Wordpress blog, but use its existing Wordpress domain misfitfarmer.com as my custom Substack domain. Of course, I had no idea how to accomplish this, which is why I had to rely heavily on customer support--a.k.a. customer support bots--from both Wordpress and Substack.

Basically, one chat bot was telling me what to ask the other chat bot and vice versa. I couldn’t make heads or tales out of what either bot was talking about (A, CNAME, AAAA, channels, domains, etc), so I enlisted ChatGPT to decipher their messages and tell me what they meant in layman’s terms. Ironically, ChatGPT threw shade on the other bots and told me I needed to request to speak to a human--who knew you could still do that?

Eventually, via old-fashioned email communication, old fashioned humans looked into things (at least I think they were humans--they could have just been higher up bots impersonating humans for all I know), so I was then the middle man/mediator between three different chatbots and two humans. I still have no idea what any of them were talking about. They basically just kept telling me what to ask and direct the others to do, and I kept obeying and relaying their messages.

At times, I had to keep the bots from bickering, but the good news is that under my leadership (or theirs?), the man/bot team fixed my problem, so now the masses can subscribe to my newsletter by merely visiting misfitfarmer.com.

The bad news is we’re all doomed.