“You must be joking?!”

I said it out loud.

You see, Reader, I’d been waiting patiently for nearly 3 hours after my allotted appointment time at the Indian High Commission for my visa application.

And now the clerk was about to send me away because I’d printed the wrong version of my application form.

I explained that I’d been waiting for 3 hours.

He said he’d see what he could do.

Apparently, there was a submitted application that I should have printed. I’d simply printed the application as it appeared on my screen. I hadn’t seen another version.

Thankfully, he printed it for me and carried on checking my documents.

We’re planning a trip to Goa, where my paternal ancestry is from. But because my father was born in Karachi when it was still part of British India, and later became Pakistan after Partition, I had to apply for a full visa.

Even though my father moved to the UK in 1961, became a British citizen a few years later, and I was born in Britain and am British.

Then came the next bombshell.

“Where is your document renouncing your Pakistani citizenship?”

I’ve never had Pakistani citizenship.

Apparently, that didn’t matter.

I needed a notarised affidavit declaring that I’d never had a Pakistani ID or passport.

Really?

Yes.

Because of my father’s birthplace.

🤦‍♀️

And this is where AI comes into the story.

I’d been using AI to help me navigate the visa application, interpreting some of the rather ambiguous questions and helping me work out what information they were actually asking for.

For example, I had to provide an address where I was staying and a referee in India. So I found a cancellable hotel booking for £60 for 13 nights. Problem solved.

It took me four attempts to get through the application before I finally reached the end and was able to hit submit.

Then AI helped me create a checklist of everything I needed to take to the appointment.

It even mentioned that I might need the notarised affidavit.

But it also told me it probably wasn’t necessary.

It was.

AI apologised.

But an apology doesn’t give me back the 3 hours of waiting or the wasted £7 car park fee.

And it reminded me of something important:

AI can be incredibly useful. But it can also be confidently wrong.

If you don't know enough about a subject to spot the mistake, it's very easy to accept what it tells you because it sounds so convincing.

And that applies to sewing too.

You can ask AI why your sewing machine is behaving strangely, and it might give you a perfectly plausible-sounding answer.

But if it’s wrong, you could end up changing things that weren’t actually the problem in the first place.

That’s one of the reasons I created Sewing Machine SOS.

I’ve trained it around the common sewing machine problems and user errors I see again and again when I’m teaching new sewists, so it’s not just guessing at what might be wrong.

If your sewing machine is making you want to say “You must be joking?!”, Sewing Machine SOS might be just what you need.

It’s currently available at the launch price.

👉 www.sewingmachinesos.app​

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Vee

P.S. I’m really excited about Sewing Machine SOS App, so you’re going to be hearing a bit more from me about it over the next few weeks.

If you’d like to stay on my email list but don’t want to receive any more emails about the app, that’s absolutely fine. Just click here, and once this campaign is over, you’ll be back to receiving my usual newsletters.