Are you human?

I dread the two times a month when I am forced to attend to my online bill paying obligations. This requires multiple attempts to sort incongruent accounting with a 1-800 number. An online amount due on portals is often not reconciled with the present amount due (American Express and my CT utility company are notoriously poor at remaining 'current.')

About a year ago I realized that being mad at a human service representative ("please press #2") even if s/he barely speaks English or lives in a country across the world is not an advanced spiritual position.

Jill Lapore (American historian and journalist, b. 1966 -) in her essay, Bot or Not appearing in The New Yorker's "Brave New World Dept." column (8/17/26), gave her readers a test for determining if you are speaking with a human.

Ask: "Are You Wearing Socks?"

Human agents laugh or come up with a quirky way to answer this question that begins the tedious process of figuring how much I really owe (based on what I've paid and consumed). I'm asking for their interpretations of statements issued by their employer that seem to require knowledge of Mandarin accounting. Of course most  human service agents don't have the faintest idea and cannot figure it either. They can only repeat what they see on their online dashboard even though it isn't updated in real time.

I will mourn the day when I cannot dial 1-800 or 1-888 because I am of a generation when we could do that - pick up the phone and have the feeling that something was going to get done. Bills were going to get paid! And sorted for tax time!! Another task could be tacked and self esteem could grow.

Other generations who grew up tied to cell phones as though they were a part of their human body of course dread dialing the phone. This means having a conversation that cannot be scripted or edited (not that!) and prefer texting chat bots or AI agents.

WHEN AI COULD NOT HELP ANSWER AN INARGUABLE SAFETY CONCERN

I did come up against it when my recent international flight was delayed for six hours and my driver could not do a 2 AM JFK airport pick up. I did not want to check into a NYC hotel if a reservation agent could not confirm that a concierge or bell hop would be at the front desk to let me during the dead of early morning.

Under the duress of a very delayed flight (thanks Jet Blue for the $75!), all I could imagine was standing with my new tan and suitcase on 59th/Park at 3 AM in the morning.

Way too late into attempting to make a room reservation with a corporate hotel chain on a 1-800 number, I realized that I was speaking with a service representative that could not admit to not being human. I hung up or clicked off, rather impolitely, realizing that the AI decision tree had not been coded to account for this question. A human could have called the hotel and gotten the question answered quickly. I suppose this would have been a next step - presuming of course that some NYC hotels still employ human reservation agents.

HUMAN ENDING TO POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS SITUATION

It had not been necessary. Another human sitting next to me at the gate with her head in her hands (six hours is a long delay) had overheard my distress, even though I was trying to whisper with AI on my cell phone.

Imagine this. She was also returning to the same state, in the same direction! Her driver could help us both!!

She was wearing socks.