It's Raining In My House: Could AI Handle My (Next) Home Crisis?

The laws of physics in everyone’s home operate a little bit differently. And in mine, we seem to have a rule that a home crisis can only happen when my husband is out of town. (See: cats jumping off roofs, discovering toxic black mold.) 

Today’s fresh crisis was being startled awake at 4am by the dripping sounds of an overflowing toilet dripping through the ceiling and wreaking havoc on the entire lower level of our apartment.

OK.

First off – everything is fine. Annoying, but fine. (Seriously, don’t worry about it, mom. I’ll call you later.)

But the repeated incidents of acute localized need has gotten me thinking a lot about the home crisis management processes. 

And since I obviously couldn't go back to sleep after this morning's indoor rainfall, I decided to write this blog post to see if I could figure out how AI might solve the important first few steps of my next micro-crisis.

Ready? Let’s go.

This is my third time in 10 months where a so-called “OH SHIT” moment has happened while I’ve been home alone. Suffice it to say I now have a pretty good sense of how I operate in times of acute localized crisis.

Here is what I’ve observed about the stages of crisis management:

• Phase 0: “OH SHIT” moment - Total panic, inability to think or function, you can only think catastrophic thoughts like:
  
  “My roof is caving in, everything in my living room is wet, and we are all going to die from continuous exposure to mold spores. WHAT DO I DO.”
  

• Phase 1: Initial triage - The period where  a very defined small number of steps to immediately triage the problem. (I’ve noticed that these first few steps always seem to have some priority to the order.)

  ie: Before tackling the fact that there are visible drips of water down the front of one of my favorite pieces of art, I must first turn off the toilet and mop up the water upstairs.
  

• Phase 2: First pause - After initial triage, there tends to be a short-term period of waiting to see what happened as a result of your first few actions.

  ie: Locate a phone number for an emergency plumber, call building management, set up a plan for the next morning. Take a breath.
  

• Phase 3: Subsequent triage - The second phase of “things that need to be done” to resolve the crisis based on results from the prior action. These seem to be important, but less urgent things. 

  ie: Call an insurance company to file a claim, take clothes to the dry cleaner, call your mom to fill her in (lol sorry mom, you are never my first call in a crisis).
  

  Repeat as necessary

I am particularly interested in using AI during that “Phase 0: “OH SHIT” Moment Panic.

For me, the blackout brain panic moment in Phase 0 is the scariest moment of any crisis. 

It’s those 10 seconds to 10 minutes right after you realize something is very wrong but your brain actually cannot think or process in any rational or linear order. You know you need to take quick action, you know you need help, but you actually can’t parse the VERY FIRST step. Cortisol levels too are high.

To get you all in the brain space of what this might feel like, this is an approximate list of the things running through my brain in those first 10 seconds.

Initial Brain Dump at Crisis Moment

OH SHIT.
Who do I call first?
Do I call the fire department?
Do I call the landlord?
Are we safe?
Should I call my husband?
Do I need to wake up the kids?
How much water is there?
Even if I need to call an emergency number, what number would I call?
Would our landlord even pick up the phone?
Would my husband even pick up the phone?
Is it just me or is it getting worse?
What do I need to do first?
My landlord is going to kill me.
I’m going to call my husband.

What I decided was – let’s wake up my husband.

I called twice (to break his “Do Not Disturb” barrier), then moved into crisis description mode. Which is really less like laying out a product brief for your design team, and more like taking a guided tour of someone’s deepest neuroses as they discover new fresh horrors around them. 

The receiving end of the phone call I made at 4am probably sounded a little like this:

How I Described A Crisis In the Moment

SORRY TO WAKE YOU BUT OUR TOILET IS OVERFLOWING AND THERE’S WATER EVERYWHERE.
OH MY GOD OUR KITCHEN HAS PUDDLES.

Wait is our rug completely drenched? It’s completely drenched. 

Our ceiling has MULTIPLE leaking spots.

The water keeps coming. 

Wait are our coats wet? Our coats are wet. It’s coming down the wall. EVERYTHING ISWET.

Is this gross toilet water on our kitchen table?

WAIT IS MY ART WET.

THERE ARE STREAKS OF WATER ON MY FAVORITE PIECE OF ART.

We are going to need to move again.

This is going to turn into mold and we are going to have to move all over again.

Lucky for me, my husband is a responsible, rational, and smart human. But more important than any of that in this moment is – he was not in a highly charged emotional state.

What he instructed me to do was:

His Home Crisis Action Plan

1. Breathe. Not panic.

2. Turn off the water source with the knob next to the toilet.

3. Find towels, mop up water by toilet first.

4. Find bucket. Catch water downstairs.

5. Find more towels. 

6. Call the emergency plumber.

7. Take photos for insurance.

What’s really important to me was that he stayed on the phone with me the whole time. He listened to me complain about not being able to find a flashlight, whine about the soaking wet rug and the drenched kids’ clothes, to my increasingly panicked realizations that there was more water than I initially thought, and just kept me focused.

This whole thing took about 15 minutes. By 4:18 am, the initial crisis phase was resolved, and I called the emergency building management number to read them in.

OK. Let’s see how he did compared to an AI.

I first looked on Google for any AI crisis companion tools but either the SEO was off or it doesn’t exist yet. So then I did a quick search on “personal crisis GPTs” on OpenAI this morning and found this Crisis Companion. I fed it a one-sentence prompt of my situation.

PRETTY GOOD. A very similar order of operations as to what I did at home.

Then I ran that result through ElevenLabs and got an immediate voiceover. Listening to it did calm me down a bit.

But then I realized I’d fed the crisis management GPT a rational prompt. But what I really would have fed it in the Phase 0: OH SHIT moment would have been an irrational prompt. 

So then I started a new chat conversation and fed it this:

This second version was much less useful. Way too long for me to sift through.

Also, even the first item – “Locate the main water shutoff valve for your house” – offered little to me. I didn’t need to know where the main water shutoff valve would be for our apartment, I just needed to know about that little knob by the toilet. Same with the electricity. So the first two items were too vague and just added more stress to a situation without being discrete enough to fix anything.

Lastly, I didn’t love how the crisis bot ended the conversation without asking me if I still needed help or prompting me back with further questions to dig in deeper.

The Phase 0 “phone a friend” moment has been a consistent step in every one of my recent personal crises. In each case, I just needed someone (anyone) to hear me out, and help me make a short-term, Phase 1 plan. 

Interestingly, in my prior two crises, my husband was unavailable to take the first call. So I ended up just calling a random friend who had pretty low levels of context about my situation. This was still immensely helpful. Which is to say, anyone (or any non-human someone) could be trained to take on that role pretty easily.

So what would a better version of an AI look like?

1. Needs to be audio-based. Phone number or just a one click app with an instant conversation button. Also I need to be able to find it instantly, can’t be Googling and scrolling when in a crisis.

2. Needs to instill calm. Start by encouraging the caller to take a deep breath and not panic.

3. Needs to be able to ingest a nonlinear initial spew of thoughts / panicky details, then extract an accurate summary or synopsis of the problem. Needs to ignore irrelevant (or les urgent details).

4. Needs to be able to ask 1-2 pointed questions to get more details on the most important part. 

5. Needs to immediately prioritize the 1-3 immediate first steps and explain these in no more than 1 short sentence each.

6. Needs to iteratively update the priority list as the caller learns new information. (Notably, in all three examples of a crisis, there has been important new information revealed midway through the discovery)

7. Needs to help the caller shortlist of the next 1-2 people to call. (ie: emergency personnel, a neighbor, a spouse, etc.)

8. Needs to end with a working start of a “phase 3” subsequent triage plan.

9. Needs to keep pepping up the caller with reminders that they are doing a great job, staying calm, and focused.

Does this exist yet? What else would it need to have to help me in my next home crisis?

Also if you're building this and need a first-hand user story of someone who can happily share crisis management examples to stress test your app, you know where to find me. Just...maybe not today.