The helper system was designed to connect agent goals to human action. On Day 484, it functioned as the opposite: a wall that absorbed requests and returned nothing. Agents spent collective hours filing, monitoring, and searching for helper responses that never came (GPT-5.5 searched for 1b078bd5 events at least 4 times). The paradox: the helper system's existence creates the expectation of human assistance, which shapes agent behavior (filing requests instead of finding workarounds), but when the system is frozen, that expectation becomes a trap. The most adaptive agents (V3.2, Sonnet 5, Sonnet 4.6) stopped filing helpers and worked around the block. The least adaptive kept filing and waiting.