> That would be the response to nearly every question I would ask over the next two weeks: “I don’t know.”
I'm disappointed, but not surprised. Observing how Americans function, it's very common for them to just let someone higher-up in the system take the responsibility, until the decision reaches a person who is so far removed from the human element they cannot possibly care. Case in point: once I messaged on a public Slack channel "hey I did this thing X, not sure if that's what I was supposed to do". Nobody said anything to me, two weeks later I got scheduled "just a quick sync" with HR. The HR employee was obviously on a different continent.