Automating tasks can save a company a lot of time and money.

In today’s story, one boss encourages the employees to automate as many tasks as possible, but she wasn’t expecting them to automate her out of a job!

Let’s see how the story unfolds.

Automated my useless boss out of her job

This happened a few years ago, I was a data and reporting analyst and did all the ad hoc reports for the company.

My boss, we’ll call her Kerry, was a useless, she was one of these people that was always late, left early and took days off at short notice.

The only thing of value she did was all the regular reports – sales, revenue etc.

We suspected she got away with it because she was having an affair with her boss, we’ll call him Stewart.

The CEO was a good guy.

Our CEO was a fairly decent bloke, he’d look for ways to cut costs and would pay regular bonuses for the best cost saving initiatives.

Kerry was very keen to submit ideas and encouraged us all to automate our tasks so she could try and take the credit for the savings.

On one of her skive days, which coincidently Stewart was “sick” as well the CEO was desperate for the sales report my boss does.

I said I’d give it a look and see if I could get it done.

OP really impressed the CEO.

Normally she’d spend 2-3 days doing it each week but the CEO wanted it that afternoon.

A quick inspection of the data showed it would quite easily be automated so I knocked up the necessary script and got it over to the CEO who was super impressed that not only had I got it done in a couple of hours but also that it could be updated whenever he needed it.

He asked if I could also look at the revenue, churn and a couple of other reports.

Over that afternoon I automated everything my boss did.

Kerry and Stewart were in for an unpleasant surprise when they returned to work.

Both Kerry and Stewart were back in the next day but were immediately summoned to the CEO’s office before being suspended and sent home.

Turns out the CEO knew they were having an affair and all the times they were sick or late or had to leave early was so they could sneak off and be together.

He’d not done anything about it because how important these reports were.

Now they were automated he was able to get them suspended and later fired for gross misconduct for all the time they’d taken off.

I also got a nice bonus out of it.

That worked out really well! She sounds like a very valuable employee.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This is funny!

This person shares a story about a lazy secretary.

The CEO should’ve fired the boss a long time ago.

It probably wasn’t a coincidence.

Automation can cost you your job.

So be careful how redundant you make yourself.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.