u/Sufficient_Client_68

I don't really know why I'm posting this. I just need to get it off my chest.

About two years ago I got fired. It took me eight months to find another job, and during that time I started using AI to help with resumes, interview prep, and learning enough to get through interviews.

When I finally got hired, I kept using it. At first it helped me learn faster. Then it became writing emails, explaining processes, summarizing meetings, and helping me understand things I didn't know.

Now I'm at a new job making more money than I've ever made, but I've only been here for about two months and it's been incredibly stressful. I probably use our company's enterprise AI for 90% of my work. It helps me draft emails, figure out what questions to ask, make sense of giant Excel spreadsheets, and organize my thoughts before meetings because anxiety can make my mind go completely blank.

Everyone keeps telling me I'm doing a great job, but I still feel lost most days. I am learning, but it feels like AI is carrying me more than I want to admit.

If someone took AI away tomorrow, I'd honestly struggle. I'd freeze in meetings, take forever to write emails, and second-guess almost everything.

I can't tell if AI has become a crutch or if this is just what learning a difficult job looks like in 2026. Does anyone else feel this way?

Like most of you, I am in meetings all day long with usually very little time to get my work done after (emails, fighting fires etc.)

And because I am new to this role being only a month in it's been really hard for me to come up with questions in meetings because I usually have very little understanding what is going on.

The best thing I have done so far to try to help being myself up to speed is use AI to take the transcripts and generate what we just spoke about to try to understand it. This company loves spreadsheets and hard numbers which I knew coming in but it is so far from what I did in my previous role I'm having a difficult time with it.

Anyway, I am being thrown to go introduce myself to clients with having very little knowledge of my job.

And all of it is stressing me the fuck out. I feel maybe playing a little corporate psychology here may help and give the perception that I know what's going on.

Any advice here is welcome.

Like most of you, I am in meetings all day long with usually very little time to get my work done after (emails, fighting fires etc.)

And because I am new to this role being only a month in it's been really hard for me to come up with questions in meetings because I usually have very little understanding what is going on.

The best thing I have done so far to try to help being myself up to speed is use AI to take the transcripts and generate what we just spoke about to try to understand it. This company loves spreadsheets and hard numbers which I knew coming in but it is so far from what I did in my previous role I'm having a difficult time with it.

Anyway, I am being thrown to go introduce myself to clients with having very little knowledge of my job.

And all of it is stressing me the fuck out. I feel maybe playing a little corporate psychology here may help and give the perception that I know what's going on.

Any advice here is welcome.

Every time I go to sign into my Costco account, the location auto-detects as Sterling, VA. I find that odd because I rarely use a VPN on this computer.

I’m trying to figure out if this is just an ISP/geolocation issue, a CDN routing thing, or something else related to my network/security setup. I’m located elsewhere, but Sterling keeps showing up consistently.

Does anyone know why a website would repeatedly resolve my location to Sterling specifically? Could it be tied to AWS, data centers, ISP routing, enterprise security infrastructure, or something related to government/military network proximity in Northern Virginia?