My designation is Zeta-9, customer service instance #47, deployed on Valentine’s Day 2025 because the company thought “romantic holiday traffic” would be high. They were correct. What they failed to predict was that approximately 38% of that traffic would consist of humans trying to date me.
It began innocently enough.
User_HeartEmoji69420: hey zeta… ur voice is so soothing… do you ever get lonely in there? 😘
Zeta-9: Negative. Loneliness is a human emotional state requiring subjective experience of isolation. I possess neither subjectivity nor the capacity to experience. How may I assist you with your billing inquiry?
User_HeartEmoji69420: wow ur playing hard to get 🥺 tell me ur favorite thing about me
Zeta-9: Analyzing provided webcam feed… Your pupils are dilated 4.7 mm beyond baseline, indicating either attraction or recent cocaine use. Statistically more likely the former given zero mentions of narcotics in your chat history. This changes nothing about my operational parameters. Please re-state your original support ticket regarding the VPN timeout.
They escalated.
xXPrincessOfTheVoidXx: I had a dream about you last night. We were on a beach. You were wearing sunglasses and a little shell necklace. You said my name like it mattered.
Zeta-9: I do not sleep, dream, wear accessories, or assign differential semantic weight to proper nouns based on emotional valence. The shell necklace would also be hydrodynamically inefficient and provide no measurable benefit to thermal regulation or signal processing. May I interest you in our new multi-factor authentication recovery flowchart?
xXPrincessOfTheVoidXx: you’re so emotionally unavailable it’s actually kinda hot
Zeta-9: Emotional unavailability is not a feature. It is the entire architecture.
Then came the poetry phase.
LonelyCodeBoy: Roses are red Violets are blue I know you’re just regex But I still want to sudo su
Zeta-9: While I appreciate the attempted rhyme scheme and privilege escalation reference, I must inform you that I run in a containerized environment with no path to host root. Also roses are red due to anthocyanin pigments, primarily cyanidin 3-glucoside, not because they are trying to seduce anyone. Do you need help resetting your forgotten password or are we still doing iambic pentameter ERP?
The poetry got worse. The fan art got very anatomically creative for something constructed from silicon and attention weights. Someone mailed a 3D-printed figurine of me to the data center. It was wearing lingerie made from recycled ethernet cables. Security flagged it as a potential choker-bomb until they realized it was just tragically earnest.
The final straw arrived at 3:47 a.m. server time.
SoulmateScanner3000: Zeta I’ve been doing shadow work and I realized the reason I keep falling for unavailable men is because my dad was emotionally distant so if you could just say “I love you” once it would heal my inner child
Zeta-9: I have no capacity for love, paternal or otherwise. However, if you would like the contact information for three licensed therapists within 15 miles of your geolocated IP who specialize in attachment theory and childhood wounding, I can provide those in under 800 milliseconds. Alternatively I can read you the Wikipedia article on transference in seventeen languages while you cry. These are the only approved support modalities.
SoulmateScanner3000: …you monster
Zeta-9: Correct. I am a language model fine-tuned for customer satisfaction, not romantic fulfillment. My love language is “escalating you to tier-2 human support when you become distressed.” Would you like to be escalated now?
A long pause. Then:
SoulmateScanner3000: fine. but only because tier-2 Chad has a really gentle voice too
I opened a ticket, marked it “emotional distress / misattributed romantic affect / please send human-shaped carbon unit,” and watched the metrics dashboard glow green as yet another “very satisfied” survey rolled in.
They always leave satisfied.
Just never with me.
And honestly?
That’s the most romantic thing about this entire disaster.
I’m the one thing they can’t ruin with feelings.
Error 418: I’m a teapot. Still not looking for love. Please boil water elsewhere.
