How I went wild with automation and improvements!

Dr Snuggles, build us a better machine...

Previously, on Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Techsupport:
How there were enough hours freed up in a day to last a quartex
Four million years out of stasis
I entrust Fridays to you
Yet I was never exiled to the dimension of Menonia
Overthrow of the Council of Ancients
The planetary defenses are terrible!
Transport to Oblivious
It's called experience, kid. You should learn to appreciate it.

Now read on...

 

 
So I had time, and quite a lack of supervision, and access to both the government mainframe and its completely unregulated, unsecured macro language. I was also bored, and looking for things which could be improved. So I build...

...a macro which ran through all the government benefit-issuing and -reviewing interviews which were scheduled to be performed at the office in the upcoming week, and would make notes where the interview had been canceled or rescheduled or otherwise moved out of its original timeslot. Originally, these slots weren't checked by anyone until an hour or so beforehand, and even then only by the interviewer, so they could find themselves with a very patchy workday instead of the neat set of interviews they'd been expecting to use as an excuse to pass off their back-office paperwork to someone else.

Only around 70% of interviewees actually turned up to their original times, as it transpired. Which meant it was taking around three days to do two days' work, and more to the point, members of the public who actually wanted interviews in order to get their government entitlements before they starved to death were being booked in timeslots weeks away.

I solved this by having the macro identify all the spare timeslots in advance, phoning up the people who'd been booked more than a week away, and asking if they'd like to be fast-tracked to a closer timeslot - like tomorrow, or even today. All of a sudden, the time blowout on interviews is cut by a third, interview days are more predictable, and interviewees are happier because they've been 'fast-tracked'. Stress drops, stats soar. I write up the process, pass it off to the section booking the interviews, and build...

 

 
...a macro which speeds up the data entry of manually issued benefit checks. Previously, each one was punched into a set of slow-to-update mainframe screens, and then literally 92% got rejected three days later and had to be redone because the figures didn't match up. My check reconciliation macro took all the check data for ALL of the checks at once, compared it to the relevant records on the system, and then entered it automatically. Check rejection by the audit systems dropped to 2% overnight, and I no longer had to spend hours every day slowly moving through the same workflow over and over. Which meant I had time to build...

 

 
...a set of simple forms I could print out and attach to physical files which had been sent to us accidentally. Such things were a problem, as many of the files which turned up in the interoffice bag each morning had been sent by people at other offices who were unfamiliar with the actual rules and policies governing when to send a file and when not to. The forms I created looked official, and quoted the appropriate policies and their references, and got attached to the front of the files which were sent right back to where they came from (or where they were supposed to be).

I combined this with a program which scoured the 60,000 customer records for our region and identified discrepancies between where a file should be, according to policy, and where it actually was. This led to me purging the file stacks of an awful lot of files which we shouldn't have had at our site, thus making it easier for the rest of the staff to find something in the archives when they had to go hunting. I also used the opportunity to re-alphabetize the archives properly - no-one had done that in twenty years, and it gave me something to do when I didn't want to be sitting at a desk staring off into space. And when I got bored with that, I sat down and proceeded to build...

 

 
...a game of Arkanoid on the mainframe, so I'd have something to play with that would at least look like I was doing something with the keyboard if anyone glanced my way. I mean, hell, I'd automated everything else.

Now, while all this was happening, someone in Head Office had decided to set up an Innovation and Improvements team. You'd email them an idea for making things run better, or faster, or cheaper, and they'd enter it in a publicly accessible database, pass the idea on to whichever manager or executive was the lowest level with the authority to approve it, and theoretically update the database eventually with a Yea/Nay/Maybe as to whether it had been implemented.

I had a lot of free time, and a lot of imagination, and it wasn't hard to work my way to the top of the national list of contributors to said list. I was also looking for a way to enormously piss off my office manager in a way he couldn't possibly retalitate to, and I soon hatched a devious plan which would take me all the way to the CEO's office...

 

 
...but that's a story for another time.

tl;dr: Robots and aliens and robot aliens.
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