There seems to be some semi randomness involved. I got an answer, then refreshed and got the message you mention, asked again and got the answer I got the first time.

That's its version of ELIZA's "Tell me about your mother". It has a couple of canned replies that it uses when it's being throttled. I had that come back for even innocuous questions. It's a dishonest trick, but then we're playing a deceitful game, so it's fair.

I imagine it would be quite difficult if it had another job to do where it couldn't just shoot you down like that.

That's not it. I think there are multiple calls to open AI one for assessing the input and another four assessing the output. Sometimes one of them goes through. The output is an assessed so you can get through with the same prompt