Imagine working for a company where you’re known for having an IT background, but your coworkers really have no idea about your work experience.

If you were tasked with doing something you had never done before, would you let on, or would you take advantage of unlimited overtime and learn on the job?

In this story, one person is in this exact situation, and he chooses the second option. It’s a very important task, and he has a lot to learn. Can he pull it off?

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Overtime

At present my company-generated email signature tells me that I’m a “Digital Operator”.

To me that sounds like some sort of awesome technological hitman, but it’s really a catch-all term for someone that has multiple “technology” related roles (if the sales and management team don’t understand it, it’s technology).

Before rising to the ranks of Digital Operator I was a Laser Operator. Which sounds even cooler, but there was a silent “Printer” after the Laser.

The following is part of the tale of my rise.

He was given a wide variety of tasks.

It was general knowledge in the company that I came from an IT background and could do computer magic.

The particular type of magic was lost in translation, so I got asked to help with anything from navigating the MS Office Ribbon interface (we recently upgraded) to writing compelling reports to management detailing how the server room should probably be cooled by more than a $20 pedestal fan.

Because all our IT staff were based about 300 miles away I decided to generate goodwill and help out; we were running Windows XP, so the local administrator password was just a rainbow (table) away.

As it turns out, competence (even faking it on occasion) has its own reward.

There was a big problem with a presentation for an important client.

We had just hired a new General Manager for our branch.

I had a great working relationship with the previous GM, and she had been kicked up the chain to acting CEO. The new GM had been on board for about a week.

We were also up for a contract renewal with a major client. Part of this was a presentation of our work flow process, basically the path their data took through our systems.

This was a major client, a lucrative contract, and apparently we bombed the presentation hard. The CEO’s words immediately afterwards were, and I quote, “Summon Get Pyrogenesis”.

The presentation really was horrible.

It turns out the ‘presentation’ had consisted of a ton of A3 sheets of printed Visio diagrams. Oh so badly printed. Badly enough that you couldn’t quite read the descriptive text on each horribly placed flow-chart box.

The client thought it was a joke; not in a metaphorical sense, they actually thought we were messing about, it was that bad.

The problem was, this presentation was the culmination of a couple of months of work.

So naturally I was asked if I could completely rebuild it. In one week.

He didn’t let them know he’d never done this before.

Pyrogenesis: “Unlimited overtime. I’m going to be working from home, the computers here aren’t good enough.”

GM: “Done.”

Pyrogenesis: “Ok then.”

I had no design background. None at all. I could fix and troubleshoot hardware and software, but I’d played around with a bunch of stuff and figured I could do this.

He came up with a way to complete the task quickly.

There were originally 5 charts to rebuild.

I still had a fulltime job to do (I couldn’t operate a room full of laser printers and work on this).

With that kind of timeframe I was just going to create some high-res images that could be smoothly zoomed in on. Zoomed out you can see the whole process, zoom in on a single step to see the details.

It worked ok. The GM liked it.

But the project was far from over.

GM: “So I got us an extra two weeks. Can you add all these extra things?” So many things

Pyrogenesis: “I guess so. More overtime, right?”

GM: “As much as you need. Oh, can you animate it? I want it to be animated.”

Pyrogenesis: “Umm…. Unlimited overtime right?”

GM: “As much as you need.”

It was a lot of work, but working remotely made it better.

Complete rewrite!

I can’t add animation to anything I’d just finished making. Oh, and I have NO FREAKING IDEA how to animate this, so a complete new software package to learn. Neat.

Eventually, after 3 weeks and over 100 hours of overtime, I had completed the task.

The stress was crazy, but working from home meant I could drink on the job! Yay!

This was a much better presentation.

It was viewable in Google Chrome, and I packaged it with Chrome Portable. It was self-contained on a flashdrive, you didn’t have to install anything. There were around 20 pages of interactive, animated content. Infinitely zoomable without quality loss.

GM: “This is exactly what I was thinking about, you read my mind. This is amazing!”

The client was blown away.

I’m told they sat in the boardroom and had fun trying to track some of the random animated stuff I had flying in the background.

There’s good news and bad news.

We won the contract, the business was saved. I was a hero!

Then the GM got fired a month later because he ticked the Board of Directors off.

At least I got a couple of grand out of it.

It sounds like this employee really can work some magic. Even if he has no clue how to do something, he can figure it out quickly and execute it like he’s been doing this forever.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

He really does deserve a big raise.

This person had the same job title.

This person wants to know more about the presentation.

It certainly was ambitious!

With enough overtime and determination, you can accomplish anything!

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.