Yesterday I was frightened I might lose access to my blog, Since 5am I had sat on a customer support line manned by artificial intelligence and promising me prompt attention from a human .
After 6 hours staring at a chat screen which promised me to hang on for a human. I wrote to another source of artificial intelligence
Ironically, at first I was told that unless I paid WordPress money I could not get support.
After production of receipt , AI backed down.
The intelligence was decent enough to recognise the receipt I forwarded to it . Eventually at 3pm I had a reset which allows me to write this morning.
It’s why there were no blogs yesterday morning , till I retrieved what I was writing to Muntazir late in the afternoon.
There is no one to talk to at WordPress, there is only AI to deal with when things go wrong. That night I did not sleep well, nearly 9,000 blogs that describe to me what has happened to my life did not appear to exist – at least according to artificial intelligence.
I guess the 10% of tickets that humans handle make WordPress the big money!
Herein the vision of those who run technology companies and press for a service where there is no-one to talk to because all is done by data centres. It is a vision that I and Jonathan Poll and David Lynch had one lunchtime in Cheltenham when we started a corporate service for Eagle Star pensions late in the 1990s. Millions of customers and a small roomful of people making sure that the computers were switched on (well that’s how we thought of it back then).
It wasn’t till January 2009 that I started committing my diary to digital publication and then only to find out what it felt like. There were times when I lay awake and when I stared at a message saying I would have a real human to talk to, that I wondered if my life really was real- whether I wasn’t digital! The human never turned up to man the chatline, I got a combination of laptops and phones to verify that I was Henry Tapper and not a hacker and that the 9000 blogs were mine.
There is no one else who has access to my blog but during parts of yesterday I feared there might be. What happened to get the “critical error” which locked me out is beautifully explained by the bot who helped me out of my identity terror! Here is the mail that got me out of trouble
I understand that your WordPress.com blog at henrytapper.com has gone down with a “critical error” message, and you’re unable to access it despite having renewed it in May 2025#
That was kind and understanding – and pure AI! He/she/it concludes
For the critical error you’re experiencing, this typically indicates an issue with a plugin, theme, or possibly a conflict between WordPress core and one of your site’s components. Since you mentioned you have a transaction ID, it appears you’re on a paid plan that includes plugin access.
Based on the information you’ve provided, I’ll need to look into this further to help restore your site. The transaction ID you’ve shared will help verify your ownership of the site.
I hope that helps! If I misunderstood your question or if you have any follow-up questions, please reply to this email and one of our experts will get back to you.
We used the following support guides to generate this answer. You can review them for further help:
I don’t understand what happened and why it happened and I think that the phrase the bot is grasping for is “shit happens”.
We will need several more iterations of conversation before Bots can work out the amount of technology that its conversant can manage. In my case “shit happens” would have done fine, so long as I know that my blog is in safe hands. I am not sure if I should be happy that I have got my blog back or sad that I am so vulnerable – both to losing my blog and to losing my good humour with AI!
But I think I may have learned something about promises. When a bot tells you that a human is going to follow up very shortly, be sceptical!
