The AI agent is a hot topic these days. Everywhere you turn, a human has been replaced by a calm, always-in-control digital voice that promises to help you. And if you try hard enough, you can still reach a real person for higher-level support.
Well… not this time.
I’ve been using Microsoft Teams at work and at school for years. It’s familiar. It’s predictable. So using it to run my small pilot course felt like the obvious choice. I’m a creature of habit, after all.
So I kept trying.
I followed every piece of documentation Microsoft offers. I called all four customer-support phone numbers. I clicked through portals I could no longer log into. And, in a moment of pure desperation, I even asked my IAM tech lead at work for help. He stayed with me after hours and guided me patiently through every troubleshooting scenario until we had exhausted them all.
All in vain.
Every single AI agent did the same thing. It sent me to a portal I couldn’t access and then hung up. I tried different prompts, different paths, different numbers. Always the same loop. By the end of the week, my account didn’t even seem to exist anymore.
Locked out.
Unreachable.
Gone.
By the end of this first week of the year, I was wiped out from simply trying to get back into an account and service I had paid for. Every night I found myself asking the same question: what else could I possibly do? Should I cut my losses and move on?
There’s something strangely revealing about moments like this. We think we’re just dealing with a tech problem, but what we’re really bumping into is something deeper: how little control we actually have, how fragile our carefully built plans are, how quickly a simple thing can turn into a small existential crisis.
Of course this happened to me.
Of course it happened in the first week of a brand-new year.
Of course it happened right as I was trying to start something meaningful.
Why wouldn’t things work smoothly for once?
Because that would be too easy, my friend.
That’s what my girlfriend, Michelle, tells me every time something goes sideways.
Yet we keep going. Not because everything works, but because the thing we’re trying to do matters more than the hustle.
And the takeaway for this first week of the year: life doesn’t reward us with ease when we step out to create something new. It usually hands us a locked door, a looping robot, and a test of how much we really care.
That would be too easy, otherwise.