I know, I know... I haven't posted anything here in forever. I've been furiously writing code to get FishTwits up and running (well, either that or enjoying the Swedish summer), which has kept me distracted from blogging. But a story came up in conversation yesterday which I figured I could briefly share here, if only for the sake of posting something.

It was a summer in the early 90s and I was working a temp job in some NSP¹ offices in downtown Minneapolis, behind the Basilica. They were running rebate programs for converting conventional incandescent lighting to compact fluorescent bulbs or LED exit signs. Most of my work involved entering rebate data into spreadsheets. As time permitted, I also rewrote the spreadsheets' calculations to streamline the process; my improvements were accepted enough that I was never told to stop doing it, but not accepted enough for me to be allowed to pass my changes on to anyone else.

Anyhow, one day, I was given a huge list of rebate application numbers along with instructions to look those applications up on the mainframe and copy certain data from them into a spreadsheet. Apparently the IT department were too busy to do a proper query to export the needed information from the mainframe's database, so they decided to keep me busy for a few days retyping it all by hand.

Talk about a boring waste of time... Of course I wasn't going to do that.

No, this was in the days of Windows 3.x² and Microsoft was still shipping Macro Recorder as a default application in every Windows installation. After doing two or three of them by hand, it was just a matter of a few minutes to create a macro which copied the application number from the spreadsheet, pasted it into the mainframe's search field, copied and pasted the relevant result fields into the spreadsheet, and then moved to the next row in the spreadsheet, ready to do it all again. A couple quick test runs to verify it worked, then I set the macro to loop, kicked back, pulled the latest issue of Byte out of my backpack and did a little reading.

Although nobody said a word to me about it, I got some of the dirtiest looks from people as they walked past my desk and saw me "slacking off" on company time. In the end, though, I finished 2-3 days worth of (busy-)work in the span of about 45 minutes and, since there was no retyping involved to introduce errors, all the data was copied flawlessly.

And that was one of my first lessons in Why Corporate Jobs Suck: Nobody cares what you accomplish, only that you look busy.

² And token ring networks, which invariably resulted in the network going down at least once or twice a week when someone's PC would hang or crash and fail to pass the token on.