After our divorce, my ex-husband got to keep the house and quickly moved his new girlfriend in, apparently believing that everything would continue working just as it always had. A week later, he called me furiously, insisting that I “fix this pile of stones” because nothing in the house was functioning the way he expected. What he had failed to realize was that the smart-home system, irrigation, security, internet, and several other essential services were connected to accounts I had personally set up and paid for. Once I quietly canceled my contracts and closed those accounts, the comfortable, fully automated home he believed he had won became far less convenient.
Without my subscriptions and service agreements, the automated features and security measures he had come to rely on no longer worked as he expected. Everything from basic connectivity to home security depended on services I had maintained rather than being permanently included as part of the property. After those services were discontinued, he had to face the resulting problems himself. To get everything working again, he now needed to arrange and pay for new installations, establish replacement service agreements, and cover the expenses involved in rebuilding the entire system. He had won the house in the divorce, but he soon learned that owning the building was not the same as retaining all the systems and services I had been paying for to keep everything running smoothly.