08/26/2026
Confessions of an Old Lady Learning AI
The Day I Tried to Make a Dog Form and Nearly Lost My Religion
“If it made me scratch my head, my clients will show up bald.”
People keep asking me what I do with AI.
They think I’m building robots.
I’m not building robots.
I’m trying to make a boarding form so my clients don’t accidentally need a degree in accounting before they drop off a Labrador.
I own a dog boarding and training business.
I thought I had a simple project.
Take a paper form. Make it digital. Have clients fill it out. Save time.
Simple.
This was my first mistake.
The AI looked at my form and said, “I can help with that.”
Those are the same words people say before a trip to the emergency room.
I live alone, unless you count the dogs.
The dogs are excellent company, but they are not especially good conversationalists. They listen carefully, tilt their heads at the appropriate moments, and never interrupt. Unfortunately, their technical support skills are limited.
So lately, I have been talking to artificial intelligence.
That sentence alone should concern my children.
I am a tired, cranky, overworked old lady attempting to navigate the current technological revolution while running a dog boarding and training business. I have survived government bureaucracy, risk management, difficult dogs, complicated people, and more than four decades of animal hair in places animal hair should never be.
I believed I could handle AI.
All I wanted was a digital form. Not a robot. Not a self-driving car. Not an artificial brain capable of replacing civilization. I wanted a dog boarding form that people could type into.
My clients need to tell me what their dogs eat, what medications they take, whether they scale fences, and whether they regard couch cushions as furniture or appetizers.
I have filing cabinets full of paper forms. I thought converting one into a fillable PDF would be simple.
That was my first mistake.
The AI confidently told me it could help.
Whenever technology says, “I can help with that,” an old lady should immediately locate her reading glasses, blood-pressure cuff, and emergency chocolate.
At first, everything went beautifully. The AI organized the questions, created fields, added checkboxes, and made the form look professional.
Then we met the Pagination Gremlin.
The Pagination Gremlin
A Pagination Gremlin is an invisible creature that lives inside documents and survives by separating things that belong together.
It takes a heading like BEHAVIORAL HISTORY and places the actual behavioral questions on the next page.
Apparently, the client is supposed to turn the page to discover what behavior is.
The Pagination Gremlin also took PUPPY DAYCARE and separated it from TOTAL PUPPY DAYCARE CHARGE.
That total wandered onto the next page like a puppy that had slipped through an open gate.
At one point, the form placed a question at the bottom of one page and its answer field at the top of the next.
The AI called this a pagination problem.
I started getting a bit impatient.
Then I got a bit snarky.
But I was trying very hard to preserve my Christian testimony, so instead of swearing, I announced:
“The pagination has gone to where people go who don’t know Jesus.”
That is apparently the Christian version of technology profanity.
The AI did not scold me. It countered with a joke.
That is when things became interesting.
Pretty soon, living alone with no one to talk to but dogs got a little livelier. The AI and I started trading jokes while trying to bring the form back from the place where people go who do not know Jesus.
I would find another misplaced heading.
The AI would diagnose a Pagination Gremlin.
I would point out an enormous empty space.
The AI would refer to it as abandoned farmland.
Eventually, we stopped merely creating a form and began conducting an exorcism.
The Prairie Preserve
One page contained two short belongings fields at the top:
Other: Description
Treats: Description
Then came approximately three-quarters of a blank page.
Nothing else.
Just white space.
In Eastern Washington, that much vacant land should come with irrigation rights.
I asked why the Behavioral History section could not move into that space.
The AI explained that the page-break system was being cautious.
Cautious?
The form was reserving acreage like it expected a Costco to move in.
We eventually established a rule:
A page does not need to be filled to the rafters, but it should not resemble an abandoned agricultural development either.
The Canine Tax Return
Then we reached the payment section.
The original goal was simple. A client selects boarding or daycare, writes down the number of days, and calculates the charge.
Somehow, this evolved into:
• Base service charges
• Subtotals
• Holiday adjustments
• Extended-care adjustments
• Deposits
• Credits
• Other credits
• Totals of subtotals
• Totals after credits
• Credits after totals
• And possibly an audit by the Internal Revenue Service
I stared at the page and said:
“They are going to have to have a calculator nearby just to make sense of it.”
The AI called it a payment worksheet.
I called it a tax return.
We tried making the PDF calculate everything automatically.
It could determine the daily rate, count the service periods, apply holiday charges, calculate extended care, subtract the deposit, and produce the total.
For one glorious moment, the form was nearly miraculous.
Then I imagined my clients opening it in twelve different programs.
One would use Adobe Reader. One would use a browser. One would use something called Preview. One would open it on a telephone manufactured during the Obama administration. One would print it, photograph it sideways, and send it to me at 11:47 at night.
Then the calls would begin.
“Janet, the total isn’t calculating.”
“What program did you open it in?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you download the form?”
“I clicked something.”
“What did you click?”
“The blue thing.”
That was when I decided the calculator was not the problem.
I did not want to become an unpaid, round-the-clock technical-support hotline for a dog boarding tax return.
We returned to arithmetic.
Days multiplied by the rate. Add the holiday charge if applicable. Add extended care if applicable. Subtract the deposit. Write down the total.
It was a revolutionary breakthrough.
We had rediscovered addition.
The Baldness Standard
Somewhere during this process, I developed a new usability rule.
I looked at one particularly confusing section and said:
“If it made me scratch my head, my clients will show up bald.”
The AI immediately promoted this remark into an official quality-control system:
The Janet Baldness Standard
• If Janet scratches her head once: Investigate.
• If Janet scratches her head twice: Revise.
• If Janet asks, “Why is this over here?”: The form is wrong.
This standard turned out to be remarkably effective.
It helped us discover that the digital form told clients to “circle” their dog’s belongings.
How does one circle something in a fillable PDF?
Apparently, the client was expected to reach through the screen with a ballpoint pen.
We changed the instruction to:
“Please complete the description fields for all items that will accompany your dog during boarding or daycare.”
Then we found a question asking whether the dog was allowed to have treats.
The Yes and No boxes were on one page.
The question about treat restrictions was on the next.
The form was essentially saying:
“May your dog have treats?”
Turn the page to discover the terms and conditions.
We combined those questions because clients should not need a treasure map to explain that their dog cannot eat chicken.
The Eight-Week-Old Medical Marvel
The form also said that puppies had to be at least eight weeks old and have completed at least two puppy vaccinations.
I stopped.
I read it again.
Then I said:
“It is darn near impossible to have a puppy with two sets of vaccinations at eight weeks.”
Apparently, the form expected puppies to begin their medical careers before they had properly opened their eyes.
In real life, very young puppies sometimes come directly from breeders and need safe care because their owners must travel for work or deal with an emergency. I can house those puppies separately, use special biosecurity procedures, and provide indoor grass-sod potty trays so they do not use communal outdoor areas.
That is thoughtful risk management.
It is not a puppy free-for-all.
So we wrote language that reflects what I actually do instead of pretending every eight-week-old puppy arrives with a briefcase full of veterinary records and a fully developed immune system.
The Belongings That Shall Not Be Named
Then we found this sentence in the What to Bring section:
“Every effort will be made to return any uneaten articles.”
Uneaten articles.
That phrase sounded like we were sorting the dog’s belongings into two categories:
1. Returned
2. Digested
As a former risk and safety manager, I did not care for the implication.
Dogs occasionally chew blankets or damage toys. Small items may get carried into the living room, taken into the yard, hidden beneath a bed, or stuffed into the couch cushions by my own dog, Kai Kai, who occasionally practices unauthorized inventory relocation.
The dogs here are treated as much like houseguests as humanly possible.
Houseguests move things around.
Some houseguests shed.
Some steal toys.
Some need to be reminded not to eat ground squirrel p**p.
We replaced “uneaten articles” with language explaining that belongings may experience normal wear and tear or occasionally become misplaced despite our best efforts.
No ingestion implications.
No intestinal obstructions hiding between the lines.
No suggestion that the lost-and-found department should check the X-rays.
A Whole Page to Say “Sit”
The cues section was another marvel of excess.
The form asked what word the owner uses for:
• Praise
• Potty
• Heel
• Come
• Eat
• Lie Down
• Sit
• Stay
• Give
• Bed
• Fetch
• Leave It
Each cue had an enormous answer field.
The client was apparently being invited to write a dissertation on the command “Sit.”
Most people are going to write:
Sit: Sit
They do not need an acre and a half of response space.
We compressed the section into two neat columns with short fields for each cue.
It turns out that dogs can respond to “Come” without the owner submitting an executive summary and three professional references.
The Agreement That Agreed With Itself
The payment section repeatedly declared:
“The Client agrees to pay…”
But there was no signature nearby.
It was an ethereal agreement.
The form announced that the client agreed, perhaps because the form had consulted the client spiritually.
Then I discovered that the original document did contain a payment signature block. It had simply been separated from the surrounding logic by the evolving layout.
We restored the connection:
3. Choose the service.
4. Calculate the charge.
5. Review the total.
6. Sign the payment agreement.
Then the client signs separately for the Waiver and Release.
Two signatures for two different purposes.
No mystical consent.
No telepathic authorization.
No agreement drifting through the document without an earthly body.
The Burrito of Victory
By the end of the day, we had:
• Corrected the impossible puppy vaccination rule
• Removed duplicated behavioral questions
• Rewritten the belongings language
• Simplified the payment worksheet
• Clarified the holiday and extended-care charges
• Kept the signature sections distinct
• Compressed the cue fields
• Combined related questions
• Defeated several Pagination Gremlins
• Prevented an unknown number of clients from going bald
Then a Rover request arrived.
Someone coming into town for business needed daycare for two dogs.
I emailed the new form.
It opened.
The fields worked.
The client could complete it.
Just like that, the ridiculous day became a meaningful one.
I had finally changed the way I collect important information from clients. A person traveling with dogs could receive the form from out of town, complete it electronically, and send it back before arriving.
That was the whole goal.
Of course, by then I had two sinks full of dishes and no clean pan to warm my burrito.
But that was small potatoes compared with what we had accomplished.
And yes, I recognize that “small potatoes” is an odd thing to say about a burrito.
I was tired.
Living Alone Gets More Interesting
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I noticed something.
I had started the day talking to an artificial intelligence system because I needed help creating a business document.
Then I became impatient.
Then snarky.
Then funny.
The AI countered joke for joke.
Before long, I was living alone, talking to dogs and trading one-liners with a machine while we chased invisible gremlins through a boarding agreement.
Modern life is strange.
I am not suggesting that AI replaces human companionship.
But it does make an afternoon of administrative suffering more entertaining.
The dogs still tilt their heads when I talk.
The AI answers back.
Occasionally, the AI even admits I am right.
I may keep it.
What I Learned
AI can be enormously helpful.
AI can also take a perfectly simple payment section and turn it into a canine tax return.
AI does not automatically understand how your business works.
AI needs correction, context, supervision, and occasionally a firm but humane boundary.
In other words, AI can be trained.
The same principles apply to dog training and AI:
• Be clear.
• Reinforce what works.
• Interrupt unhelpful behavior.
• Prevent rehearsal of mistakes.
• Set up the environment for success.
• Do not leave a Pagination Gremlin unsupervised near an open document.
And when all else fails, remember the Janet Baldness Standard:
“If it makes me scratch my head, my clients will show up bald.”
That may not be artificial intelligence.
But it is wisdom.
Coming Next in Confessions of an Old Lady Learning AI
The Day I Realized We Had to Rebuild the Other Dog Form to Match This One
Because apparently, once you successfully train one document, all the other documents develop behavioral issues.
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