On Thursday night, I met the wife of Mr. Blueberry.

I first wrote about Mr. Blueberry a couple of weeks ago. He’s the personification of evil, or at least the evils of customer services. My solution for the Mr. Blueberry’s of the world - and I’m simplifying here - was to fire them all and bring in the robots. Or maybe have the robots fire them. Or even maybe the robots should fire on them, with lasers.

It’s because of people like Mr. Blueberry that I try to use computers to bypass people as much as possible. It’s quicker and doesn’t require me to put on clothes.

So when it finally came time to buying tickets to The Dark Knight Rises, I of course went online. That’s when I encountered the first problem of shopping online, which is that someone else is almost always there before you. Most of the shows on opening night had sold out. There was some swearing, but if my computer cared, it didn’t show it, another advantage to not dealing with humans. I bought tickets to Brave instead.

I left the house for the theatre, and in a move normally cheered at movie theatres, I left my phone at home. When I arrived at the mall, I walked up to the automated kiosk, which asked my for my reference number, which of course was on my phone at home. I walked up to the counter where Mrs. Blueberry was standing and explained my problem. No worries, she said, just give me your phone number.

There was a pause as she typed in my number, again and again. Finally, she said, “Sorry, I can’t find your reservation.”

I then gave her my name. Nada. I told her which showing I had booked, and I think I even told her which seats. No Dice. Next, I gave her the credit card I had used to buy the tickets. No luck, bub. Care to double down and buy those tickets again?

The frustrating thing about this wasn’t just that I had never had a problem with buying tickets online before or that it was my own fault I had left my phone at home; it was that I couldn’t make a scene.

It’s one thing for a 6-foot-3 man in his 40s to demand loudly that the theatre had screwed up and lost his tickets when it’s The Dark Knight Rises. “These aren’t the tickets I want; they’re the tickets I need.”

But for the same person to throw a hissy fit over a movie about a Scottish princess who spends most of the movie riding her horse and arguing with her mother is, well, creepy. Rather than look like the next Jerry Sandusky, I walked away defeated.

I went home, got my phone, and went back to the theatre. I gave a new cashier (not Mrs. Blueberry) my reference number, and BOOM, my reservation appeared - with my name and phone number attached.

I’m not sure who to blame.

Mrs. Blueberry? Not this time. She tried everything in her power, however limited, to find my tickets and was, unlike Mr. Blueberry, not as dumb as a rock. She tried. You sometimes get points for that.

The theatre? Well, they did train Mrs. Blueberry, and I have this nagging feeling that had Mrs. Blueberry known how to really use the theatre’s ticketing system, you’d be reading about something else this week. But no, the theatre didn’t build the system. They just bought it, and it’s worked fine before. Besides, the theatre made up for it later with genuinely good customer service and new tickets for the next showing. A free bag of popcorn wouldn’t have killed them though, would it?

How about blaming… myself? Sure, I could have made things easier on myself by bringing my phone along, but there is still a part of me that resents having to have my phone with me 24/7. I’d like to be able to buy something on my computer online and, when I walk up to a human being and just give them my name, or maybe just an ID, get whatever it is I bought -- all without lugging around the extra hardware.

Well, is there anyone else we can blame? How about some soulless software engineer happily living in obscurity in his parent’s basement (I’m assuming he’s happy because no one who has used his software has found him yet)? He’ll be writing bad code for years to come.

The only thing worse than not being able to use the internet to avoid dealing with incompetent people is being stuck with mobile Apps written by incompetent people.

If incompetence is simply going to migrate from people to computers, then what the hell is the point? Of course, the reason is obvious. We build technology to be better than ourselves, but our creations are only – at best - as good as we are. We have yet to build a machine that can make itself better than us.

For now, that’s not so much of a bad thing (think Skynet, or maybe just Google) but it does mean that unless we figure out a way around that problem, we’re going to be stuck with the Mr. Blueberries of the world and their poor relations.