How I Got My Ex Girlfriend Laid Off

I was one semester away from graduating college, and enjoying my summer internship at a software company that created automated guided vehicles for factory floors. I had been dating my ex girlfriend for a little over a year, and she had gotten a summer job through her dad’s connections. Her summer job was incredibly relaxed compared to mine, because she would be texting me all day while I was trying to work. I would casually send these sly text messages back saying something along the lines of “Shouldn’t you be working?”, but she would keep texting. She, and the rest of the employees at the company were hourly. She did get work done, but she was somewhat fixated on me.

After about a month of working there, she was at my place one day, and I asked her what she did. She was working for a no-name small company that didn’t really have a company name that would collect information on people from many different sources to identify their political affiliation, then consolidate that data in order and offer it to campaign managers. She had gigabytes of excel spreadsheets that she would go through, look for connections, and merge them together. There were other people at the company that were doing the exact same thing. It would take her about 1 week to get through 1 spreadsheet, and she was given about 12 to get her through the whole summer.

I asked her if she could demonstrate how she did her work, and I watched her merging rows from one spreadsheet into another because it was similar information. The wheels got spinning, and I had an idea: I can automate this. I pulled out my laptop and wrote a simple Java application using Apache Commons to load the spreadsheet into memory, and the application wouldn’t start up — not enough memory. I went over to my gaming rig that had 32 gigabytes of memory at the time and tried loading up the spreadsheet with the same application — success. Within 4 hours, I had a working prototype of how to automate her job. We passed a few spreadsheets through, and the test was successful. I remember running the application on a single spreadsheet, there was so much data that it took over 60 seconds to process an individual spreadsheet, but it took 1 week for a single employee to do the same amount of work.

Before she left, I passed the rest of her work through the application, and gave her the results on a thumb drive. When she returned to her office the following weekday, she handed in the spreadsheets, and asked for more work. Her manager told her that there was no further work for her to do for the rest of summer, and let her go. He paid her for the hours that she worked, and that was it. He did note how impressed he was with the pace at which she worked, and he told her to enjoy the rest of her summer.

I was astonished at how her company was completely oblivious to technology, and have no idea how simple tasks can be automated. I’ve often thought about the impact of how automating certain jobs would affect certain industries. One of the largest jobs to automate is the transportation industry with self driving cars and self driving semi trucks. If this were accomplished, I feel it would not only take away jobs from the drivers, but this would impact road side restaurants as well because there are no drivers that need to stop and eat. It would also have an impact on road side motels as there would be no drivers that need to sleep. It’s fun to think about.

This story does have a happy ending though. A few years after this incident, her manager reached back out to her as he had a significant amount of spreadsheets that needed to be done. Given the pace at which she worked, the manager offered her a contract in excess of $20,000 to complete them all.