Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.I’d like to preface this by saying that customer service is a thankless job and those who do it should be honored like the troops. —KateNew on ICYMI: TikTok is about to get the Twitter treatment.Head over here to subscribe to ICYMI wherever you listen to podcasts 🫶lolI come from a speak-to-the-manager family. I suppose I’m lucky that one of my most traumatic childhood memories is cowering in the corner of a Delia’s as my parents yelled at staff about the price of jeans. I wouldn’t be surprised if my high school administrative office had a special ringtone for my dad.Today, my sister won’t hesitate to threaten GrubHub with a drone strike over a single loose french fry in the bag. Personally I have tried to break the cycle, and avoid blowing up at 19-year-old retail assistants or remote gig workers in Bangladesh if I can. But that promise is getting harder and harder to keep, as customer service positions are filled not by conscious humans who can be reasoned with, but by bots.Shortly after Christmas, I got into a fight about a birdfeeder accessory. I’d gifted one to my dad that it turns out he already had. The online store doesn’t have an exchange policy, but the website said in no uncertain terms that I could return the device within 60 days for a refund.Whatever software the company uses to deal with customers, however, disagreed. I can’t say for certain I was sending my emails to robots, but I’d put money on it. It didn’t matter how many times I quoted or linked to the site, “Sofija” continued to insist that they would not let me return this item, and that I was going to die with this birdfeeder extender still in my possession.“That’s going to be the future of customer service,” Parker Molloy said on a recent episode of ICYMI. We were talking about Grok, specifically, how it was being used to gaslight users, saying that issues had been resolved when