Something went wrong. The car charger wouldn’t work. Terrible, enervating, life-shortening faff ensued. It was to do with the wifi to which the car was linked having to be changed. I find this stuff so boring that I have been known to simply slump to the floor and fall into a deep sleep.

But this wasn’t an option, as I had to drive miles to work and my car’s batteries were as empty as my soul. I’d already been on the road for five hours listening to Antony Beevor’s history of the second world war. Man’s inhumanity to man is so very disappointing, even more disappointing than a malfunctioning EV charger on a wet and windy day. I resolved to dig deep. The human spirit would prevail. If only I could find another human to help me out.

I messaged the bloke who had installed it, but time was pressing, so I tried the manufacturer’s website. It was all big and glossy, banging on about a green future, sustainability, solar this, inverter that. I was invited to visit support. Click. Sorry, page doesn’t exist. Great. Deep down, hidden in the base rock of one of the pages, I found a precious relic from a bygone age – a phone number. Murmuring prayers of thanks and hope, I made the call.

My phone told me I was calling a number in a small town in the east of England. An encouraging sign. It felt real. A competent techie with a strong Hull accent would have done nicely, but an automated American voice picked up, accompanied by stimulating piano arpeggios. My heart sank. I selected option two, for technical help. Hearing office noise – keyboards clacking and so on – I perked up. And then came the voice: “Hi. This is Rachel. How can I help you today?”

Rachel wasn’t human. She sounded almost human, but not quite. I told “her” – seriously, what are the pronouns here? – that I needed help changing the wifi details on an EV charger. I muttered this almost shyly, uncomfortable about participating in such a chilling charade. It was chilling in that attempts had been made, with the carefully curated background noise, to make “her” environment sound real. Chilling in that this was an attempted act of deception.

Her voice was the aural equivalent of those silly photos or videos you used to see of faces superimposed on other bodies, for jokes, back when you could still see the joins – and that was the joke. Now, this stuff is so sophisticated that it looks real, so you have a video of, say, Donald Trump playing ice hockey on the US team. It’s so perfectly executed that your laughter – if there is any – is laced with unease. Where does all this end?

I told Rachel what I needed. “Certainly, I’ll put you through to someone who can help.” But then the line went dead. Thrice more I tried, trying to win Rachel round, hating my complicity in this nonsense a little more each time. Still nothing. I was almost relieved. Relieved that the madness was glitching, so – for now – I could see it for what it was.

Then the bloke who had originally fitted the charger, Stuart, called. If he had been there in person, I would have hugged him – not because he might fix my charger, but because he was real. Stuart took me deep into the weeds of IT stuff way beyond my ken, getting me to input stuff like 10.10.100.453 into browsers, along with mysterious passwords and whatnot. It went on for ever. I used to despair of this kind of faff, but this was beautiful, because it was human. I could hear Stuart breathing and thinking, and we chatted about random stuff while this and that uploaded or downloaded or froze solid.

Eventually, for reasons unclear even to Stuart, the charger came to life. For this I was grateful – almost as grateful as I was for the interaction with a living being. They’re a dying breed.

• Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist

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