I Secretly Automated My Job For Years

This story is based on an interview with the editors of The Doe.

I was 26 and in between jobs when I saw a Facebook post for data entry. It looked kind of scammy, because they were looking for people to work from home, and that wasn’t very common back then—seven years ago, at this point. They told me it was a night shift position in data entry, where they would send an order via email and the worker would input that information to prepare a shipment. The salary paid a little less than $1,000 a week.

The first week, it was exciting because I was learning the ropes. By week three I was like, I cannot believe this is going to be my job. It was so dumb. I was bored out of my mind. It was basically a copy-and-paste job. There were some decisions I needed to make: container sizes, time zones, who will be receiving the shipment. But all that information was in the original email detailing the order. 

It seemed so obvious to me that this could be automated in some way. I was kind of a geek and could optimize some things, but had no idea how to code myself. Still, I knew what was possible. I called a friend who was a developer and asked him some advice. He told me automation would be feasible. I posted the job I needed, and I got a response from a freelancer in India. At first I gave him small jobs: Can you make this section automatic? Then, two days later: Now I need to add this, now I need to add that. I spent my first two months’ salary paying this guy. It got to a point where, besides the orders of four clients, the system would run automatically. 

Then I kept going: I hit up another developer for those four things I still could not do. I was still in the new testing phase for that script when, one night, I fell asleep. I woke up in the morning and I was terrified I was going to get found out. But there was only one error and I could easily correct it. I started going to bed, waking up at 4am to make sure there weren’t any errors, and then going back to sleep. I kept tinkering with the script until there weren’t errors anymore. When I reached that level of optimization, at around month six or seven, I just completely forgot about it. 

It was a dream come true—to get paid for doing no work—and I was doing it.

I got a salary raise a year in, because I was beating the living hell out of everyone else, and I never made mistakes. The only mistakes were in the original emails. I never actually talked to my bosses because we had different shifts. But he would send out emails congratulating me. They never suspected—maybe because it’s just so unlikely that someone would do what I did. They offered me a day job, but I told them I was an introvert and preferred the night shift.

I even tried to tell them what I’d done; maybe they’d be impressed, maybe they’d want to buy the code? I don’t know. I reached out to the regional manager. He replied, “Just keep doing what you're doing. We’re too busy right now to meet with you.” I remember feeling insulted, like they were doing something too important to deal with me.

One time a coworker tried to match my quota. I had it set to eight shipments an hour and I switched it to 11 per hour that month. I was switching the rate back and forth, just in case someone suspected anything. During those first couple of years, I was a nervous wreck. If my phone rang, I was like, Oh my God, they got me. The manager wanted to talk to me? Oh my god, they noticed. But no. It was always to compliment me.

I’ll be honest: I felt really smart for what I did. I had this little secret that nobody knew about. It was a dream come true for so many people—to get paid for doing no work—and I was doing it. I was so happy that this was working out, but I couldn’t tell my friends. I couldn’t tell my wife. She would lose her mind and freak out. She’s a very nervous person, and when I told her what I was doing at the very beginning stages, she was like “Did you get approval? Are you sure this freelancer is a trustworthy person?” So I started to just not tell her anything.  

After a couple of years, I went out and got a whole other day job as a Spanish-English interpreter. I remember thinking about quitting my automated job, but I had credit card debt, and I wanted to pay it off. Then my son came, then we needed a new car. So I hung onto the night-shift job. I would still get nervous. I worried they would call my other job and I’d be completely jobless. But I just couldn't bring myself to quit. It was like free money. I would keep that salary in a separate account and try to forget about it, because I didn’t want to become too dependent on it.

Almost six years in, we all got an email saying they needed to share some bad news with us. They’d finally developed new software that would replace the data entry jobs. We were all laid off.

Losing that job was heartbreaking. I had finally gotten past the guilt phase to the I-don’t-give-a-fuck-phase, and it had actually taken a while to get there. I’d finally made peace with what I was doing. Financially it was a big hit, but I was also just losing something that was really fun. When I look back at it, I still giggle.