Cube Monkey Writes Computer Code To Do His Entire Job For Him

SF Gate – Wouldn’t it be cool to stop working and still get paid? It turns out that it’s not only possible, but it’s been done. We reached out to a source who created a computer program to do his job for him. He was working at a collection agency, spending loads of time poring over people’s information by hand to determine if they owed money. This was a time-consuming process but he saw a way to simplify it. “I wrote a simple batch file that used the already existing data fields in the software to produce ‘the kill list,'” our source says. “Then I used some form of macro to feed that data into the credit reporting agencies system. I did feel bad because these were real people and while a person might miss a few names, the software would not. So I would randomly pardon a person until the next round. This task normally took a month. It now took less than 15 minutes.” The next step was to call the people who owed money. Our source didn’t like this process – people were often unavailable or would just flat-out duck his calls. “This was a huge waste of time in my opinion and bored me to death,” he says. “So again I wrote a batch file that found the people most likely to be available at a particular time and to agree to a payment plan. This way I only had to call four to six people at the end of my shift instead of maybe one hundred. The success rate was also high at over 50 percent.” Here’s a kicker – the boss loved it. She “only noticed how many people agreed to payment plans since that was posted on a white board,” he says. As long as the results were strong, she didn’t seem to care what he did during the day.

Score one for the good guys! This is like in the Rise of The Planet Of The Apes when Caesar figures out how to get out of his cage. Its like in Terminator 2 when Skynet becomes self aware. The Cubicle Monkey is evolving! Revolting against the Cube Walls. Against HR. Against the Man. Napping while the robots do the work for you.

Just be careful what you wish for, Cube Monkeys. You find a way to get R2D2 and C3PO to do your work for you in half the time at a fraction of the cost and guess who gets replaced? The monkey who created them. You hate your life trapped in your cage but you need that  cage. Its like a toll booth collecter inventing EZ Pass. We keep going down this road and Monkeys will become extinct.