Happiness, Engineered by WordPress.com aka Automattic, Inc.

Shout out to J. J. Happiness Engineer at Automattic, Inc. and WordPress.com.

He solved a problem that I thought was going to take days of round-and-round and refunded me $100.

Here’s what happened.

My wife saw that I was billed $100 for Akismet content spam protection. I knew I ran Akismet on three self-hosted WordPress sites, but I thought that was free tier.

After an hour on those sites and WordPress.com, I found a probable cause. I had subscribed to commercial Akismet for a business I shut down ten years ago and had been paying $100 a year to secure a non-existent WordPress site!

My heart sank. Now I’m going to have to prove to Automattic that I’m the same person and not trying to disable somebody else’s antispam.

I called Automattic. (OK, Boomer).

I sent an email. The self-proclaimed AI bot provided very clear instructions to do what I had already done. Sigh.

I replied to the AI email with some screen shots.

Within a few hours, J. J. at Automattic had found the orphaned account and switched off the service. I didn’t ask for any refunds—my mistake, not theirs—but he gave me one for the current year.

J. J.’s signature says “Happiness Engineer.” I see things like that and cringe. But as a famous football coach when I was a kid used to say, “It ain’t bragging if you can do it.”

J. J., you engineered some happiness. Here’s to you!