When my tumble dryer broke, I didn’t have high hopes of the chatbot. But the human was even less useful | Adrian Chiles

Appliance manufacturers think they've made the world a better place by automating their online help service. They couldn't be more wrong

From where I'm sitting at this moment I can order some groceries to be brought to my door in a matter of hours. I can get anything from a cup of coffee to a three-course meal delivered within minutes. In terms of personal services that I could summon at a moment's notice - well, put it like this, I wish I hadn't checked. I can buy almost anything I want from anywhere in the world for delivery at a set time. Big things and small. Big white things, for example, such as dishwashers, washing machines and tumble dryers. A couple of clicks and they'll be on their way, not a problem. Easy. But should my brand new dishwasher, washing machine or tumble dryer require a repair of some sort, that's a different story. At this point, time seems to slow down like the drum at the end of a spin cycle.

If I may write the most boring sentence I've ever written, my new condenser tumble dryer worked fine but didn't seem to be collecting any water. An unnerving, unsettling state of affairs, I'm sure you'll agree. I went to the manufacturer's website and gave the chatbot short shrift by demanding contact with a human, who then materialised. This human, if it was a human, proved to be of limited use. During the early exchanges in this live chat tennis I felt as if I got across the nature of my problem quite clearly. Not so. At the conclusion of the opening rally, the human put me completely off my stroke by asking me what kind of machine I was talking about. I checked. I'd told them that. A dryer. Then the human asked me what it said in the manual about my problem. So I gave up on this human and asked for another, more competent human. And at this point, of course, if you set aside the infernal modern madness of chatbots' livechats and whatnot, we essentially return to the last century.