Six and a half hours. I know it to the minute, because I checked the status page every ten minutes, like a kid refreshing the tracking of a parcel that's "out for delivery" (it's always out for delivery…). Each refresh, hope, then nothing.
That was last Sunday afternoon. The machine is what I call the software that does my paperwork. It started out sending invoices and chasing the people who pay late; these days it also sorts the mail and reads the books, and tells me when something doesn't add up. It doesn't live in my house. It rents its thinking from a big company far away, and that afternoon the big company went dark.
Nothing broke. The reminders waited in their queue, the invoices waited to go out, and the client abroad, the machine's first outside customer, got a quiet afternoon too. Not one client noticed. I noticed. I worked it out on the back of an envelope: by hand, that afternoon's work would take me a day. The machine does it in a few minutes. So I sat on the sofa with my phone, and refreshed, and felt useless. Powerless, really.
Around nine it came back, as if nothing had happened. I felt it in my shoulders before I saw it on the screen.
It runs out in a smaller way every week, too. I pay for a week's worth of its thinking, and lately we use it up by Saturday. Saturday afternoons now have a certain itch to them.
So what do I do on the day it's closed? I check its work. I open its log, read what it sent and to whom, and look for mistakes. I always find some. Small ones, f.e. a reminder that went out a day early, a payment matched to the wrong invoice. It does a day's work in a few minutes, and then I spend my evening tidying up after it. Babysitting, with the risk of sounding ungrateful.
Most of my week doesn't go into the business anymore. It goes into the machine: fixing its little mistakes, nudging it, teaching it the next thing. These days it even makes up a few pretend readers - made-up customers, basically - and tries its letters on them before anyone real gets one. Don't ask.
The Mrs., my wife, walked past the sofa twice that afternoon. On any other Sunday she'd have dragged me out for a walk and the latest on her sister's renovation; we're talkers, the two of us, about everything except the business. That one stays off the table, by agreement. She runs our house on what's in the account, never on what's promised. So this time, not a word from her. I could hear it anyway: why would anyone want a dependency like that?
She's right, and it stung a bit, because it's my own advice. For twenty years I've told clients not to hang their business on one big customer. I'd hung mine on one supplier.
That night I started moving the machine onto other machines too. I already pay two smaller companies to double-check its letters before they go out. Now they get a share of the real work as well. The big company plus those two: three suppliers instead of one, and three bills. Next time one goes dark, I'll still be on the sofa. Just not for the whole afternoon.
Monday morning the client abroad called. The machine had cleared most of their late payers in its first weeks, and they were pleased. So pleased, he said, that they'd taken down the ad for the junior bookkeeper they were about to hire. "Your machine does that now."
He said it like good news. For about a second, it felt like good news to me too.
Futures made of virtual insanity.
— Jamiroquai