[556x45]

Back in the 70s I did an internship at the usda. It was fairly bad back then. Our office publish monthly commodity prices and as such it needed to be on time. When I got there it was done ‘by hand’ and took several hours. To me, it made no sense. So I cranked out a quick script to automate most of the job. I got in loads of trouble for that. Then there was the office of 6 next to mine. On day 1 the first guy got a stack of applications which he read thru and checked. On day 2 he got a new stack and passed off his checked stack to the next person who rechecked them…..and so on until the original stack had been checked 6 times. They used to joke about wearing the forms out. I could go on & on. You get the pic tho. I can only imagine it’s gotten worse in the intervening years.

[Colinsky]

So I cranked out a quick script to automate most of the job. I got in loads of trouble for that.

Similar thing happened to me in the 80s. A giant defense contractor switched to a new computer system and all of the product manuals had to be transferred into the new system by hand. I was hired as a temp and after a week of tediously keyboarding, I discovered a macro function in the new system's proprietary word processor that enabled me to process six manuals a day instead of two. (There were about 50,000 manuals that had to be transferred.)

I showed the supervisor what I'd discovered and he praised me and told me to take the rest of the week off, with pay, and then I was never called back and that temp agency never used me again.