I’ve used the same lawn maintenance service for over ten years, ever since I decided (not that my wife the professor didn’t have some say in the matter) that it probably wasn’t the best idea for me to be dealing with heavy lawnmowers on large slopes that approach forty degrees in some places, especially at my then-hardly-young age. Not that I needed much convincing, since, as a teenager I mowed lawns for three long summers, and I’ve disliked mowing ever since.

I’ve always made the point of paying for a month’s service in advance by mailing a check, and I’ve never had any trouble with the service, until this month, when I suddenly realized I wasn’t getting my weekly emailed invoice. Then several sprinklers malfunctioned (beyond simple replacement) followed by a split somewhere in a main water feed.

But when I went to call the service, I looked them up on the internet to check the telephone number and discovered they had a glitzy new website which suggested I use it to schedule the necessary repairs. The only problem was that the “new” system wouldn’t recognize either my email or my street address. The new system’s chatbot was no help, either.

So, I used the old-fashioned telephone, and I got a helpful real person on the line, except she couldn’t schedule the sprinkler repair because I either had to have a credit card on file or fill out and return an email form that she would send to me. She tried four times to send the form. The system said that it sent it, but I never received anything, even though the system had the correct email address.

After more hassles I called back and got another helpful person. He found me on the system, but nothing still arrived by email. In the end, after almost half an hour, between the two of us, we figured out that my mailing street address was “wrong,” that is, that it was listed as “south,” followed by the street name. Five years ago, that was the correct postal address, but then USPS removed the “south,” despite the fact that we’re still “south.” For the most part, that hasn’t been a problem, but every so often, relatives and friends using the “old” address have letters rejected. The thing is: we’re the only house on the street, which is only a half-block long; there’s no other street with any similar name; and we’ve lived here for 33 years.

With that one little change, all of a sudden, the lawn service system could send me the sprinkler request form and all my back invoices.

But it took three human beings over two hours to “solve” what never should have been a problem, and none of us, including the tech on the system, could say why a single word in the database not even associated directly with the email address could block sending emails to me.

And the tech gurus wonder why people are leery of AI?