I stood in the kitchen. Air-frying chicken thighs. The phone buzzed.
FedEx had delivered my $2,000 e-bike. Signed for by “M.M.”
My fiancée is not an M. I am not an M. We live in Atlanta. Hills everywhere. Bonuses just came through. We bought the bikes because the money felt good for a minute. Her bike arrived. Fine. Mine vanished.
I looked outside. Nothing. No box. Just empty sidewalk and rising dread.
Then came the call. Not one call. Dozens. Weeks turned into a month. I spun in circles with FedEx, the bike brand, my bank, my card issuer. Even the police department put me on hold. Digital hold. Chatbot hell. I wanted a human voice. Just one.
The Sludge Has a New Face
It feels dystopian. But it is just Tuesday for most companies.
Artificial Intelligence is eating customer service whole. Not gracefully. 31 percent of leaders admit they cut staff or plan to. They call it “optimization.” We call it pain. Verizon’s boss told Bloomberg AI would wipe out a huge chunk of service work. He wasn’t hiding that.
For the rest of us it is slower. Duller. Meaner.
There is a name for this friction. Ryan Hamilton calls it sludge. He teaches at Emory. He has seen it change.
“Sludge existed before AI. But AI has ramped up the dystopian nature.”
Hamilton isn’t wrong. In May a report came out. US, UK, Canada. 59 percent of people hate AI support. 85 percent want a human. That is not a suggestion. It is a scream into a void.
I screamed into mine.
No One Was Home
FedEx’s bots ignored me. They looped. They gave me generic answers that felt like insults. I tried to file a police report. I am sure that was a mistake.
I called the non-emergency line. A bot asked for my details. I gave them. Silence followed. I went online. Filled a form. Silence. Then a missed call. During a meeting. Of course. I called back. The bot picked up again. Same script. Same loop.
I went corporate again. FedEx admitted the bike was missing via email. Automated text. Cold. Go talk to the seller.
The seller got me a human. Finally. Warm voice. Good news. Wrong amount. They got FedEx to cover shipping costs. Ten percent of what I paid. One-tenth. A drop.
My bank? No. My card company? No. Both led me through labyrinthine menus. Endless. One human at the end of a twelve-hour ordeal said FedEx was to blame. Go bother them again.
Sunk in the Cost
Agentic AI gets all the hype. The tech journalists love it. But it is clumsy. Meta’s Toolformer was groundbreaking three years ago. Today? Still guessing.
My bike was out there. Somewhere. FedEx had the data. A smart bot could have found it. Or found the person who stole it. Instead, the bots protected their jobs by hiding me from solutions.
Are they trying to annoy you away? Maybe.
Ravi Dhar from Yale says companies are stuck in sunk-cost mode. They spend billions on AI. Wall Street asks What is your strategy? They need an answer. So they say AI. They force the implementation. They hope it gets better.
It won’t help the bottom line if everyone quits buying. But Hamilton thinks executives know that. Some accept the trade-off. Bad service for cheap tech.
“They’re aware. They’re willing to accept that trade off.”
The risk? Uniformity. If every call center sounds the same. If every support team feels like a wall. Where do brands differentiate? Nowhere.
Still Lost
Three months passed. My wallet feels lighter. The bike is a memory. A ghost in a FedEx warehouse maybe.
I am down $1,700 out of pocket. The math does not add up to a happy ending.
I asked Atlanta PD for a comment. They said they sent an officer. I missed the call. They will send another one. They also confirmed the return number runs through a bot. An operator calls. Then you bounce back to the machine.
FedEx gave a statement. Corporate speak. Smooth.
“We use technology to amplify our team… seamlessly and swiftly.”
Seamless? I bled for twelve weeks. I felt designed out of the experience. Gatekept by algorithms that have no concept of fairness or urgency.
The chatbots haven’t fixed it. They haven’t found my bike. They are just there. Waiting for the next call. Ready to loop me again if I try to buy a car next month. Or a house. Or just ask why?
