I had a funny situation today.

One of the largest internet providers in the Netherlands was being a bit wonky. It was Sunday, and against my better judgment I decided to call their service center anyway. The line picked up, and a voice cheerfully informed me right away that I was speaking with an AI agent.

So far, so normal. Then it did something I genuinely didn't expect.

It said, in the politest possible tone:

"The office is closed now, I cannot help you. Please contact us between Monday and Friday, 8am to 5pm."

I sat there for a second, phone to my ear, trying to work out what had just happened. An AI — a thing that runs on GPUs that don't sleep, in a datacenter that doesn't take weekends — had just told me it was off the clock.

An agent with office hours

There's an obvious explanation, of course. Somewhere, a product manager decided that even though the agent can answer 24/7, the humans it would have to escalate to can't. So rather than promise help it can't deliver, it just… closes the shop.

Fair enough. But the framing was the funny part. The AI didn't say "our human staff are unavailable." It said "the office is closed." It put itself inside the office. It adopted the working hours of its colleagues.

I think we are not that far away from a time when agents take a papadag — the very Dutch tradition of taking a weekday off to be with the kids — or work a 32-hour week. Not because they need to. Because the world around them does.

The shape of work bends what lives inside it

Here's what got me thinking.

Decades were spent shaping work into something humane. Statutory leave. The right to disconnect. Four-day work weeks being trialed across the Netherlands, Belgium, Iceland, and Spain. The siesta in the south. Long lunches in France. Sundays that actually feel like Sundays.

These aren't quirks. They're the cultural fingerprints of a place that decided productivity isn't the only thing that matters.

And now that decision has to survive contact with a colleague who never sleeps. Agents don't have kids to pick up. They don't need a Tuesday off to recover from the weekend. So the question is: do we let them work all the time, or do we make them match the rhythm of the people they work alongside?

This particular internet company, apparently, picked the second one.

Two futures

I can see this going two ways.

In one future, the world becomes more productive precisely because agents are always on. The siesta gets quietly outcompeted. The four-day week becomes a luxury you can only afford if your competitor hasn't deployed an agent yet. Cultural nuances dissolve into a flat, always-available global service layer. Everything is open. Everything is faster. Something is missing, but nobody can quite name it.

In the other future, we extend the rhythms we already built for ourselves to the systems we build. Agents close the office on Sunday. Agents take papadag. Agents respect that some things shouldn't be answered at 11pm just because they could be. We regulate not the technology itself, but the texture of life around it.

I don't know which one we'll get. Probably some uneven mix.

Closing time

What I do know is that a phone call to a Dutch internet provider on a Sunday afternoon shouldn't have made me think this hard.

But it did. Because somewhere in that small, slightly absurd interaction was a real choice that someone made: that even an agent that could work weekends, shouldn't. That the office is closed. That you should call back on Monday.

We are living in interesting times.

I'm going to call them back on Monday.