Artificial Intelligence.

They say that artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity, but I’m beginning to wonder.  I have an additional monthly fee on my Verizon cellphone bill that allows me to make international calls (for a costly per-minute fee) and with rearrangement of new technologies, I no longer need it.  So I went on the website to cancel it.  Could find how with a couple questions to the FAQ bot, so I clicked for a Chat person, thinking I was going to get a human.  I didn’t.  At first I wasn’t perturbed by this, but a couple lines in…..  this is the transcript of the conversation.  I’m the voice in blue.  

It gave me one answer four times and another twice before it finally realized it was out of its depth.  By then my session had timed out in the other window and I was connected to a black hole.  I followed a different track later to get to a real human, by which time I didn’t really care if helpdesk was being outsourced to Alpha Centauri, it was a sentient being…..