Google’s Left Hand Is Waiting for Its Right Hand to Synchronise
Back in the day, I used to write software. I've worked with a lot of code monkeys in my time. They would sit down, blitz the keyboard, stand up and go home. Not my style at all. I would go in an hour early and leave an hour late. I was paid a lot of money on an hourly basis, 37.5 hours per 5-day week. It was obvious to me, the company I was contracted to would employ me again if I got the job completed early and in good working order. So, I worked an extra couple of hours a day to keep the project manager happy. Sure things went wrong, but at least it was easy to find something concrete to blame. A misplaced character. A faulty assumption. A programmer who had decided that nobody would ever enter a date like that, and lots of those code monkeys who had never heard of writing an error trapping routine.
Now we have artificial intelligence and everything is wonderful and hunky-dory, with connected marketing platforms and systems designed to make running a small business easier.
So you can imagine my disappointment when I have spent most of my morning trying to establish whether my business exists correctly.
Not whether it exists. Brittle Media Ltd exists. I know this because I run it, publish books through it and occasionally wonder what possessed me to become a publisher.
The question is whether the various systems involved agree about its existence.
Apparently, this is more complicated.
The photographs that weren’t there
My latest encounter began with the IONOS AI marketing assistant informing me that I had photographs waiting to be published.
This was news to me.
“What photographs?” I asked.
On being challenged, the assistant withdrew the claim. There were no photographs waiting to be published.
An interesting approach to helping a small business: invent some work, alert the owner, then abandon the work when asked where it is.
I already have quite enough real tasks. I do not need a machine breeding imaginary ones.
Unfortunately, this also leaves a small question hanging over everything else the assistant says. If the photographs were fictional, how much confidence should I place in its other announcements?
Especially the one about my Google business profile being “out of sync”.
Out of sync with what?
There is something wonderfully evasive about that phrase.
It sounds technical. It suggests that a diagnosis has been made. Somewhere, presumably, two pieces of information have been compared and found wanting.
But which pieces?
Is the business name wrong? The website? The address? Has an update been submitted, received, reviewed, rejected or left quietly contemplating its future?
“Out of sync” tells me that something disagrees with something else.
It does not tell me how to make them agree.
Meanwhile, my attempts to get Brittle Media listed on other business websites have run into further obstacles, apparently connected to the same profile information.
Trying to build a wall out of jelly would be a fair description. Every time I get another layer into place, the bottom starts moving.
Who is actually holding the clipboard?
From my side of the desk, IONOS appears to send information to Google, while other parts of the process continue to behave as though the information is missing or incorrect.
That does not establish where the fault lies. I cannot see behind either company’s curtain, and after the episode with the imaginary photographs, I am reluctant to accept the assistant’s account as forensic evidence.
Perhaps Google is still reviewing something. Perhaps IONOS has an outdated status. Perhaps there is a perfectly reasonable explanation buried behind six menus and a helpful article answering a different question.
What I can say is that the customer is left trying to reconcile the reports.
I am the publisher. Somehow, I have also become the person carrying messages between systems supposedly designed to communicate with each other.
Back to the source
Eventually, I went directly to Google and started checking and updating Brittle Media’s details there.
So far, that has been more productive.
It has also reminded me how much time can disappear into the machinery surrounding a small business.
Writing the books is only part of the job. There are covers, editing, distribution, websites, marketing and all the administrative odds and ends that turn up demanding attention.
Tools that reduce that workload are welcome. Tools that announce nonexistent photographs are less welcome.
A useful assistant should be able to tell me what it knows, what it cannot confirm and what needs my attention. If a system has rejected an update, show me the rejection. If something is waiting for review, say so. If the status is unavailable, admit it.
I can work with uncertainty. I struggle to work with confident invention.
For now, Brittle Media’s details are being attended to, and I hope to return to writing fiction shortly.
Although I appear to have competition from my marketing assistant, it's use of fiction is fast becoming legendary..
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