How I got Fridays off for my manager.
(Background: Working ten minutes a day; getting paid for eight hours and what I did with all that spare time.)
So I've arranged to have a lot of spare time on my hands at this one government job, and I've been tinkering with the mainframe scripting language HQ has started developing. I've noticed that my manager (who is not part of IT, but I have to report to someone better-paid on the org chart) spends her entire Friday running reports.
And by this, I mean "manually calling up over three hundred mainframe screens one at a time, waiting for them to load, writing down the numbers on a piece of paper, doing basic math on said numbers, and then punching the final handful of figures into a template report which is then physically printed out, goes off to HQ in the internal mailbag, and is probably binned.
It occurs to me that this is the kind of thing computers were invented for. If only there were a guy like me around to automate it.
Wait a moment - I'm a guy like me!
So I use the supplied increment and decrement commands in the scripting language to create a library of basic math functions, and write a script which will flick automatically through the 300 screens and record their numbers. (Fortunately, the screen names are very predictable and can be generated in a few loops rather than having to manually specify each one.) Then all the numbers are added, subtracted, multiplied and whatever to get the final result, which is simultaneously displayed on the screen and printed out on the manager's printer as a one-page summary.
The whole process takes about fifteen minutes from go to whoa, most of which is screen retrieval time. Coincidentally, it's also the exact amount of time specified in the union contract for the mid-morning break. So my manager could set it running on Friday morning, go have a nice cup of coffee, and have all her Friday workload done and printed out by the time she got back to her desk.
Given that she was a pretty good (and hands-off) manager, I casually mentioned after the first successful test run that I didn't see any particular reason why I should talk about the existence of this script to any of the other managers in the office. After all, it wasn't official, was it?
After that day, I could pretty much get away with almost anything on her watch. Including things like semi-accidentally undermining the state-level helpdesk, or the "More Magic" stunt. But those are stories for another time.
tl;dr: Why don't public servants look out of the windows in the morning?
Posted Mar 13, 2012, 8:46 AM UTC · edited