There are times in life when you try to help people out…and it backfires in spectacular fashion.

The person who wrote this job said they tried to make a good first impression their first day at a new job, but someone else paid the price for it.

Take a look at what happened.

My first day on the job, and I accidentally got the secretary fired.

“It’s the summer of 1997, and my first day of my first job after spending 5 years at college for an MS in computer science.

While the boss is showing me around, he gets an important phone call leaving me outside with his 3 secretaries — he was always very busy, and would be lost without their assistance.

We strike up some conversation about our jobs, and one complains about how she has to keep track of some stuff on the server to make reports that the boss wanted daily, and it’s just the most boring, tedious stuff.

Eventually boss comes back out and finishes showing me around and I get settled in at my desk as the lead dev comes by to get me started on some work.

Of course, being the bright-eyed, not-yet-disillusioned, early-twenties computer nerd eager to prove my worth, I didn’t just want to do my job. I wanted to do it great and really impress people. Go above and beyond and be appreciated.

It was time to get busy.

And the complaining secretary from that morning had plopped a great opportunity to show that I’m a real go-getter right into my lap.

So over my lunch break I cooked up a simple script to collate all the information she needed for her reports so that all she had to do was press one button and make sure the report was generated correctly. I run it by the lead dev and he okays it.

I eagerly rush to tell the secretary how I’ve made the worst part of her job much less horrible, expecting her to be giddy at how helpful I am.

The boss comes back from lunch as I’m starting to tell her, and he wants to know what I’m so happy about.

As I tell them how I’ve automated the creation of those daily reports he wants, his face lights up like he’s found the goose that lays golden eggs, while hers drops like I just took a dump in her purse.

Oh, no!

It turns out that making those reports was all she was doing. The boss had hired her for that rather than just asking one of the devs to do what I had because he didn’t even know it was possible.

That was her last day there, and I was instantly promoted from junior dev to normal dev with a nice pay raise for showing great initiative and saving the company the money for her salary and benefits.

I guess I did get what I wanted out of it…”

Readers shared their thoughts.

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Another individual spoke up.

This Reddit user has been there.

Another reader had a lot to say.

And this person weighed in.

This worker definitely didn’t see that coming!

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.