When you get hired into a company to perform a job, you want to find the best and most efficient way to complete your tasks.

What would you do if you figured out a way to automate your entire job, so that it only takes you a few minutes each day to do it properly?

That is what happened to the employee in this story, so he has been working just minutes per day for years and everyone is happy.

I automated my job over a year ago and haven’t told anyone.

I work for a mid-size company that hired me to handle all of their digital evidence for trials.

Cloud systems have some nice features.

The law-firm was in the process of changing their evidence managing system to Cloud based and wanted me to be the only person with admin access to the Cloud, everyone else would be limited to view only and would work on a local network drive.

The firm gets thousands of digital documents, photos, etc on a daily basis. All of this goes on a local drive. My job is to transfer all of these files to the Cloud and then verify their fidelity.

Wow, that is a pretty simple job.

Sounds great, but I quickly realized this was the only task they expected me to perform in my 8-hour shift.

This was in no way an 8-hour job, so I was stuck finding busy work at the office most of the time.

Working from home is amazing.

Then 2020 happened and I was asked if there was any way I could work from home. I set up a remote workstation, tunneled it to my house, and that’s when the real fun began.

In about a week I was able to write, debug, and perfect a simple script that performed my entire job.

Well, that was easy.

It essentially scans the on-site drive for any new files, generates hash values for them, transfers them to the Cloud, then generates hash values again for fidelity (in court you have to prove digital evidence hasn’t been tampered with).

Before they hired me they were struggling to keep up with things.

He has a great system in place.

Employees submit a spreadsheet of all the files they’ve placed on the local drive at the end of the day. Then the admin manager would check the spreadsheet and manually drag and drop the folders/files into the Cloud.

I still receive the spreadsheet every day and it’s what I use to verify my logs.

I clock in every day, play video games or do whatever, and at the end of the day I look over the logs to make sure everything ran smoothly. Then clock out.

The important thing is that he is getting the job done.

I’m only at my desk maybe 10 minutes a day.

This is a few lines of code written in notepad.

Hey, it is extremely valuable to him and his company, even if they don’t know it.

It only has value in this situation because no one else had the skill to do it. This is the type of script people put on github with a $5 price tag linked to their PayPal.

The script is in batch with some portions of powershell. The base code is fairly simple and most of it came from Googling “.bat transfer files” followed by “.bat how to only transfer certain file types” etc.

A little trial and error is all it took.

The trick was making it work with my office, knowing where to scan for new files, knowing where not to scan due to lag (seriously, if you have a folder with 200,000 .txt files that crap will severally slow down your scans. Better to move it manually and then change the script to omit that folder from future searches)

For a while I felt guilty, like I was ripping the law-firm off, but eventually I convinced myself that as long as everyone is happy there’s no harm done.

I’m sure they are thrilled with his performance.

I’m doing exactly what they hired me to do, all of the work is done in a timely manner, and I get to enjoy my life.

Win win for everyone involved.

This is a dream job, I hope he never loses it. And if the company figures it out, I hope they aren’t too upset.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

This is the way.

Hopefully it will last forever.

Yeah, what a waste.

He is wasting a huge opportunity.

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.