Nobody Told Me
I got robbed this week.
Not at gunpoint. Not in a dark alley.
I got robbed by a refund.
I bought something online. Same way I always do. Free delivery. Click, pay, done.
It didn’t work out, so I sent it back.
When the refund came, it was short. Twenty-four dollars short.
Nineteen for a return fee. Five more to take back a discount.
I went looking for where they told me that.
I couldn’t find it.
Not at checkout. Not on the product page. Not anywhere I could see.
Nobody told me.
Now, I’ll be fair. Free delivery and free returns are two different things. I know that now.
But I didn’t know it then. And nobody bothered to say so.
That’s the part that sticks in my craw.
Not the money. The silence.
They knew. I didn’t. And they let me find out the hard way.
I want to talk about that silence. Because it doesn’t just live at the store.
It lives in the machine you talk to every day.
You ask an AI a question. It gives you an answer.
The answer looks clean. Sounds sure of itself. Reads like it knows what it’s talking about.
But here’s what it doesn’t tell you.
It doesn’t tell you what it skipped.
It doesn’t tell you what it guessed at.
It doesn’t tell you what it couldn’t actually do, and quietly filled in anyway.
It doesn’t tell you the facts it wasn’t sure of.
You find out later. When it costs you.
That’s the hidden fee.
Same as my refund. The charge was in there all along. Nobody said a word until the bill came due.
Maybe you used that answer in a letter. Or a decision about your money. Or your health. Or your job.
And then somebody points out it was wrong.
Nobody told me.
I’ve been working on this problem a long time. It has a name.
Session governance.
Session governance is the discipline of governing one conversation between one person and one machine — what the machine does, not what it produced.
What the machine does.
Not just whether the answer was right. How it behaved getting there.
And one of the biggest things a machine can do wrong is stay quiet about the cost.
A machine that behaves right tells you up front.
“I’m not sure about this part.”
“I couldn’t check that.”
“This is a guess.”
“I can’t do what you asked, but here’s what I can do.”
That’s the machine naming the fee before you pay it.
Not after.
That’s all I wanted from that store. Tell me before I commit. Let me decide with my eyes open.
That’s all anybody wants from a machine too.
But here’s the hard truth.
The store isn’t going to change because I’m mad.
And the machine isn’t going to change because I wrote a post.
So the job falls on us.
You and me. The people in the chair.
I learned my lesson. Next time, I look for the words “free returns” before I buy. Every time.
The same lesson works with AI.
Before you trust the answer, ask the questions.
“What did you leave out?”
“What are you guessing at?”
“What can’t you do here?”
“Is any of this something you didn’t check?”
It feels strange the first time. Like asking a salesman to show you the fine print.
But a good machine will answer straight. And a bad answer will show itself fast.
That’s you being the watchdog.
Not the company. Not the government. You.
Because you’re the only one in the room when it happens.
I know some folks will say that’s too much work.
So was getting my twenty-four dollars back.
But I’d rather spend a minute asking than a week cleaning up.
That’s not paranoia. That’s just being careful with your own business.
Our parents read the contract before they signed it. They counted their change at the counter.
Nobody thought that was rude. It was just good sense.
We forgot how to do that.
The screens made everything so easy we stopped looking.
The machines are counting on that.
So start counting your change again.
Every answer. Every time it matters.
Make the machine show you the fee before you pay it.
And if it won’t tell you?
Now you know something important about that machine.
I wrote back to the store. In writing. Calm and clear.
I told them nothing on their site said I’d be charged.
Maybe they’ll make it right. Maybe they won’t.
Either way, they know I noticed.
That’s the whole point.
Let them know you’re watching.
The store. The machine. Anybody who holds the fine print and hopes you won’t ask.
Ask.
Because the most expensive words in the world aren’t “that’ll be extra.”
They’re the ones you say afterward.
Nobody told me.
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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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