I used two AIs to contact RV repair shops—and still had to check Drafts

I don't really like calling businesses. We've established that. If a business requires me to call, there's a pretty good chance I'm going to keep looking. I mean, I can call. Obviously. I'm a grown adult. I just... don't want to. If they'll answer questions, give me a quote, or work out a schedule by email or text, their odds improve dramatically.

We need some work done on the RV before our trip in December. We've talked about how this is an ongoing project. Well, the project has called. It demands attention.

The furnace turns on, but it makes this horrible clicking, banging noise and barely moves air through the vents. And then the generator starts and runs, which is great, except it doesn't actually send power to the RV. Which is sort of the important part. We'd already tried a few things, including replacing the automatic transfer switch, so this wasn't just, you know, "the generator doesn't work, please fix it." There was some history there.

So I started with Gemini. I tend to like Gemini for local searches, especially if I'm trying to find an actual business nearby and not just get a generic list of things with RV in the name. And I could tell it what was actually wrong. Not just "find me RV repair." I could say, okay, here's what the furnace is doing, here's what the generator is doing, here's what we've already tried. Find people who actually work on these kinds of problems. That was much more useful.

Gemini found several local service people and pulled together contact pages, email addresses, and phone numbers that accepted texts. Then I took all of that over to ChatGPT, because I'd already been working with ChatGPT on the RV problems, so it had a lot more context about what was happening and what we'd already tried.

What I wanted was enough information that a repair person could read the message and go, yes, I can help with that, or no, that's not really what I do. Without me sending them, like, the complete autobiography of our RV. So ChatGPT helped me put the messages together. I refined them a little. Nothing dramatic.

And then the whole thing became this slightly ridiculous AI relay race, because in the setup I was using, Gemini could send texts from my phone and ChatGPT couldn't. So Gemini sent texts to about three places. ChatGPT prepared the emails for the others. I also used a contact form.

And I got a confirmation that the contact form had gone through, and one person replied by text, so in my head I'm like, okay, good. Done. We contacted everybody. We had not contacted everybody. The emails were still sitting in Drafts.

There were three prepared emails and no matching sent copies. And I genuinely thought they had already gone out. So I opened Drafts and sent them myself.

Which was actually a useful little reminder, because the text reply and the contact-form confirmation proved that those things had happened. They did not somehow prove that the emails had gone out too. My brain had just grouped all of it together as, yes, this task is finished. It was not finished.

I still like using AI for this. I don't want to write basically the same message six different ways, and I also don't want to send something so generic that the person receiving it has no idea what I actually need. The two AIs made the searching and the writing a whole lot easier. But "prepared" and "sent" turned out to be two different things, and I still had to check the work. Now the emails have actually gone out too, and I'm working on getting the RV repaired before our December trip.