[Aachen]

> why not? Esp. if that receptionist is an automaton, and isn't bothered by you

I chose "thousands" to keep it within the realm of possibility while making it clear that it would bother a human receptionist precisely because humans aren't automatons, making the use of resources very obvious.

If you need an analogy to understand how an automated system could suffer from resources being consumed, perhaps picture a web server and billions of requests using a certain amount of bandwidth and CPU time each. Wait, now we're back to the original scenario!