A fella emailed me last week — lovely fella, a developer above in Dublin — and he wanted to HELP. That's the first thing I'll say. He wasn't being smart with me. He'd seen that I answer every message that comes into the shrine, every last one, and he thought, the poor man, that's a lot of work, I'll save him some bother.
So he sent me a thing. A "bot," he called it. You feed it all my old replies and it learns to write like me, and then when someone messages the site it just... answers. On its own. Sounds like me. Says the things I'd say. I'd never have to lift a finger again.
I read his email three times. I made a cup of tea. I read it a fourth time.
And then I wrote him back — myself, by hand, which I suppose was the whole answer right there — and I said: thank you, genuinely, but no.
Here's the thing, and I've been chewing on how to say it.
When someone emails the Rattlin' Bog Fan Shrine, they are not requesting information. They could get the lyrics off the lyrics page without ever talking to me. They could read the whole history of the song and never send a word. The information is THERE. Free. Sitting on the website for anyone.
So when they email me anyway — they're not after the information. They're after a PERSON. They want to know there's someone on the other end of this old website who'll read their words and feel something about them. That's a completely different thing. That's not a search query, lads. That's a hand reaching out in the dark going "is anybody there?"
And if I let a bot answer that, even a clever one, even one that sounds exactly like me — I've answered a hand reaching out with NOTHING. With a clever nothing. A nicely-worded nothing. The worst kind.
I'd rather not answer at all than answer with nothing.
Let me tell you about an email I got in November. A woman in Manchester, her father had just died, and they'd sung the bog at the funeral because it was his party piece, the flea verse especially — he did this MAD thing on the flea verse where he'd slap his own knee, and the whole family did it at the graveside, every one of them slapping their knees, crying and laughing at the same time. And she emailed me at half eleven at night to tell me that. A total stranger. Told me the most tender thing about her dead da.
Now. Picture a bot answering that.
Even a good one. Even one that says all the right warm words. "I'm so sorry for your loss, the flea verse is special to many of us." It'd be CORRECT. It might even be lovely. And it would be a profound insult, because she would have poured her grief into a machine and the machine would have poured a templated nothing back, and somewhere she'd half-know it, the way you can always half-tell. That little chill. That feeling of talking to a wall painted to look like a face.
I took an hour over that reply. I told her about my own nan, who I sang it for. I cried a small bit, if I'm honest. That hour MATTERED. Not because I'm great — I'm not — but because it was real, and real is the only thing I have to offer that's worth a damn.
The internet now is a vending machine. I've said this before and I'll keep saying it. You put a question in the slot and a packaged answer drops out the bottom, smooth, instant, cold. And lads, it WORKS, it's efficient, I'm not denying it. But this little shrine has been here since 2002 and it has never once been a vending machine and I'll burn it to the digital ground before I let it become one.
Slow is the point. Slow is the GIFT. When I take three days to answer because I had sessions and the cat was sick and life got in the way — that delay is proof a human is on the other end. Humans are slow. Humans are busy. Humans forget and then remember and apologise. A bot is never late. That's exactly what's wrong with it.
I know it doesn't scale. I KNOW. If ten thousand people emailed me tomorrow I couldn't do it and I'd have to figure something out and maybe I'd cry about that too. But ten thousand people aren't emailing me. A handful are. Each one a real person with a real reason. And I have, what, a handful of evenings? A pot of tea? An old keyboard with the letters worn off the e and the a?
That's enough. That's the whole budget, and I'm spending it on people.
So no. No bot. Not now, not when there's a hundred emails, not when there's a thousand. The day I can't answer them myself is the day the shrine should probably close, because at that point it's not a shrine anymore, it's a kiosk.
If you've ever emailed me and waited a while — that was me, being a human, being slow, being real. Sorry for the wait. Thank you for the hand in the dark.
I'll always take it.
Slán go fóill,
BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — The developer fella wrote back and said "fair enough, that's the most human reason to refuse automation I've ever heard," and then he sent me a tenner for the cat's vet bill, completely unprompted. So that's the internet too, isn't it. People are still SOUND when you treat them like people. Rattlin' is grand now, by the way. Ate something he shouldn't have. He always does.