A grandkid is on the way! And no better time to reset the family orbit by getting closer together.
So the house is up for sale and we're moving.
Not the easiest thing to do at any time of life. And if my back and knees are any signal, not getting easier.
Step 1: "Right-sizing." Separate the "do we really need this junk" from the "necessary to the new house" from the "sort it out later stuff." As to the latter, we order a container. The big one that fills half the driveway.
Here's where we get to AI.
When the container arrived, it had scrapes on it. Small holes. I needed someone at the company to know that before my belongings went inside, because I had no interest in being held responsible for damage I didn't cause.
Reasonable request. The kind people make every day.
The website offered a chat window. I typed my concern. The Residential Moving Assistant — that's its actual name, printed at the top of every response — told me it had created case #02672962 and would "relate it to my session." Then it asked whether I'd like to wait for the next available agent, or have an agent contact me during business hours.
I pressed the button that said: Have an agent contact me.
The system responded: "Let's try that again, please click one of the options provided on the menu below."
The menu below offered two choices: Transfer to an Agent. Or End Session.
I had just asked to be contacted by an agent. Using a button the system provided. The system told me I had done it wrong, and offered me the same choice dressed in different clothes.
I clicked Transfer to an Agent.
The assistant announced it was transferring me to the first available associate. Ten minute wait. And then — and I want you to read this carefully, because it's the part that still gets me — the system sent one final message:
Residential Moving Assistant left • 4:09 PM.
Not a handoff. Not a human on the line. A notification that the bot had departed, and a prompt at the bottom of the screen: Start a new chat.
No transfer happened. No explanation was given. The case number — #02672962 — sits somewhere in a database I have no access to, attached to a session that led nowhere, filed by a system that was never going to help me and apparently knew it.
Worse still, that was not my first rodeo with an AI Customer Assistant. Just the most recent.
Here's what I want you to know about that experience: it wasn't a glitch. It wasn't a bad day for the software. It was the system working exactly as designed.
What I was talking to was AI. Narrow, scripted, deployed not to solve my problem but to manage my contact with the company. To log a case number. To route me toward patience or departure. To protect their time and systems, not serve my need.
Simply put: to service their company, not their customer.
That's the AI we've been living with for years. The phone tree that can't understand your accent. The chat window that offers five options and none of them is yours. The "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that" that comes back no matter how clearly you speak. The bot that asks you to rate your experience before your experience has actually concluded. That's all AI — narrow AI, built for one company's specific purposes, trained to deflect as much as assist.
And here's the thing I want to say directly: if your instinct has been to distrust it, that instinct is correct. You were right. The skepticism you developed wasn't technophobia. It was pattern recognition.
You encountered a tool that was not built for you, identified it as such, and drew the appropriate conclusion: AI can't help me.
But that conclusion can make your experiences even worse, because it's not just about the AI.
A Word Worth Knowing: Conflation
I learned a great word many years ago: conflation. To conflate is to merge two distinct things as though they were the same. In the digital world, as in many tool-based activities, this is expressed by mixing up the tool and what you do with it. When the Residential Moving Assistant failed me, my instinct — and maybe yours — was to conclude that AI had failed me. Understandable. But that's the conflation. What failed me was a specific deployment of AI, by a specific company, for specific purposes that had nothing to do with my needs. The tool and the use of the tool are not the same thing. So it is with AI.
Customer service AI is designed by engineers, commissioned by operations managers, and approved by executives whose primary concern is cost reduction. The math is straightforward: a bot that handles ten thousand contacts a day doesn't call in sick, doesn't require benefits, and never asks for a raise. If it resolves your issue, fine. If it deflects you — wears you down until you give up and go away — that counts as a win too. Fewer escalations. Lower overhead.
Think of it as a tollbooth. Staffed not by a person who can look at your situation and make a judgment call, but by a system designed to collect what it needs and move you along. The booth doesn't care where you're going. It cares that you don't back up traffic. Customer service "reduces friction," which is not the same as "solves customers' problems."
It's likely that the people who built the Residential Moving Assistant were not bad people. They were solving a business problem. The gap — and it's a significant one — is between the problem they were solving and the problem you walked in with. Those two problems are not the same problem. In most cases, they're not even close.
This is not the AI's doing. In many ways, "customer service" is on the great list of oxymorons. Companies have been managing customer contact — limiting it, routing it, discouraging it — since the first complaint department was invented. AI just made it cheaper, faster, and easier to scale. What used to require a roomful of people reading from scripts now requires a server and a software license.
What's new is the illusion of conversation. The Residential Moving Assistant called itself an assistant. It used my first name. It created a case number with an air of efficiency and purpose. It performed helpfulness while delivering none.
That performance — friendly, responsive, utterly hollow — is the specific cruelty of this particular technology, deployed this particular way.
You weren't imagining it. You were being managed.
A Different Animal
I'd been watching this pattern long before the moving container showed up. I spent more than twenty years doing research, and for most of that time Google was the tool. But something changed. Results got murkier. SEO manipulators learned to game the rankings. Advertisers bought their way to the top. Some subjects became too sensitive to explore beyond certain boundaries. What had once felt like a genuine search for information started feeling like a walk through a market where everything was for sale or approved. To get the answers that I wanted, I moved to other tools — Grok, Perplexity, Claude, eventually others — out of novelty, yes, but also out of necessity.
And I was getting the answers I found useful.
First, because the systems could cut through the filters — not all, but very, very many. Second, because the system is conversational. I "talked" to AI, phrasing my searches and needs in natural language. Genuine questions, with context and nuance, the kind I might bring to a knowledgeable friend. And it talked to me. Without asking me to hold, or creating a case number, or pitching me on a dubious product, or closing me off from unapproved speculations.
That's a different animal. Same word — AI — but a different thing entirely.
The Residential Moving Assistant, the traditional search engine, and the AI I'm writing with right now all carry the same label. If we as New Elders are going to move from being managed to being in control, that's the conflation we need to leave behind.
You Weren't Wrong. You Weren't Finished.
You've already met AI. It didn't go well. That's not your fault, and it's not the whole story.
What you encountered was a tool deployed with mixed interests, dressed up in the language of assistance. You were right to be frustrated. You were right to be skeptical. That skepticism is not a liability — it's exactly what this next chapter requires.
We are, as a generation, late to this particular party. But we're not arriving empty-handed. Right now, AI is in the hands of the "early adopters." But in many ways, we're the "Earlier Adopters." Our long experience — finessed by healthy introspection — has hard-won us the ability to recognize when a system is serving us and when it's using us. We've seen enough of both to know the difference.
That's not a small thing. That might be the most important thing.
ElderClaude is not here to sell you on AI. It's here to help you find your footing in a landscape that's changing faster than anyone — including the people building it — fully understands. To ask the questions that don't get asked in the tech press. To stay skeptical where skepticism is warranted, and open where openness is earned.
You've met AI at its worst. Stay with us.