[russfink]

I was a temporary worker at a field dispatch office. We had to telephone all of our technicians and enter their time into a time sheet. This was approximately 1990, and it turns out all the technicians had email. Since the time recording format was very simple, I worked out a shell script to Let them enter their time in an email message, mail it to me, then my forward rules would pipe it through a shell script, a couple of ANSI codes later, and the time was entered automatically into the system. I would check it for accuracy, but it saved me having to Tab/enter about 25 times per employee just to get to the part where I entered their time. Literally it was five minutes per person including voice comms time reduced to 30 seconds.

A senior dispatcher got wind of it. She went to the boss’ boss’ boss, and complained that “this boy is going to computerize us out of a job.”

It wasn’t long before I was summoned to appear. Three things happened at that meeting. The Uber boss told me to keep it on the down low. He also gave me a copy of his shell script programming book. And finally, he told me to get the heck out of there, go back to school and stop putzing around at a job like this before you end up becoming a middle manager like himself in a career with low reward.