In 2012, I was working for an audiobook publisher on ePub conversion that added audio. For whatever reason, that project got shelved, so I was moved into audio auditing.

The job: For each set of tracks (bible versions included well over 1,000 each), listen to the first and last three seconds of audio for pops/clicks, overprocessing, usw. Flag hot files, combine good ones.

The workflow: Open tracks in VLC, manually advance from start to end for each one.

It was immediately clear this was not going to fly for how I spend eight hours a day. It’s possible to create a less efficient workflow, but it would take significant effort.

Visual Studio was installed on my machine, so I looked at media-control OCXs in VB.NET (this is very much a situation where the user controls were front and center, so the time needed to be spent on form design, not coding). In under a week of “spare time,” it was ready to go.

Track positioning and advancement were by default handled to job spex, but I added other options for edge cases.

New workflow: Select folder in app, note bad audio, concatenate good chapters.

A couple of weeks later, half the department was laid off. My boss invented a fictional scenario in which I’d failed to do what I was told, screaming at me on the floor.

I walked out the door.

…

In 2015, I was working at a Gannett hub and was tasked with creating the workflow and overseeing the nascent department being created to bring in external clients. (Clearly an $18/hour role.)

IT had handled CMS ingestion to a point, but malformed XML sends were an ongoing problem I had to manually tackle. Everything else was up to me to design and build out, including managing client expectations as we got our shit together.

When I accidentally discovered that the client’s CMS had your garden-variety security hole of only requiring a sign in to see the landing page by pasting a URL from one browser to another, I was able to automate budget ingestion by creating URLs via concatenation in Excel, extracting the table data and presenting it in a format my team could actually use.

The weekly sheets I created also had event triggers where updating status internally sent email notifications to the client when that step required their attention.

Then came the new centerwide page-volume expectations and heightened reporting requirements — which were so onerous that they were taking fully one-quarter of my team’s production time while the floor for satisfactory output went from 1.5 pages per hour to 2 (as counted over the entire shift). Combined, it meant that in one fell swoop, my designers were expected to go from 12 pages in eight hours to 16 in six. Work quality suffered tremendously, which is not ideal when we’re literally the department corporate is shopping around to bring in new clients.

I tried to find extant solutions, with the obvious one being that we should have API access to our own CMS. All the new data that designers were required to manually provide was already being generated; we just didn’t have access. This was a brick wall at the director level because they thought it entirely reasonable that a vendor would charge extra for us to access our own data, and there was no budget for that.

But losing 25% productivity was apparently a nonissue with over 200 full-time designers. Budget’s there for an extra 50 people, I guess.

So this is where I went off the reservation and added page tracking to the sheet. As designers marked things ready to proof, that timestamp was saved and attached to the user account performing the action, so there was simply no more reporting to do. Each designer ran a menu command at the end of the week to populate their reporting sheet.

My team went back to having 8 hours a day for design, and we were generally a happy bunch, cracking inappropriate jokes just like in newsrooms of old.

In an open floor plan.

This caused two issues. One, the other teams were starting to get pissed that we had this automation and they didn’t. I pressed for a wider rollout several times, revealing the second issue: The directors needed inaccurate reporting for a things like disciplining employees, and without that, they were going to have a hard time justifying what they were being paid to do.

I got a 0% raise for my efforts and was shunted to another department where I couldn’t cause as much trouble. Problem was, that “it could be more inefficient, but I’m not sure how” was even more applicable in this situation.

The job was manual ad placement, and we were a team of three. I spent the first couple of weeks learning the InDesign DOM since I’d just taught myself JS to automate Google Sheets. A month later, total workload was maybe 30 hours a week.

And this is when IT got wind of my repeated automation projects and put the kibosh on anything further. You can’t code at Gannett unless your title indicates that’s your role.

After being strung along for the final 18 months about transitioning into a role in IT, I finally gave six weeks’ notice and left. I’ve never actually heard an HR representative express surprise and dismay about management decisions, but that came out in my exit interview, and she said that given what actually happened in terms of communication vs. what I’d been promised and she’d been led to believe, she’d have quit as well.

…

Bringing us to today. Owner and his wife are my direct superiors at a small trucking firm. I make worse money than in journalism in absolute 2017 dollars, to say nothing of inflation-adjusted figures.

Owner told me he’d been wanting to figure out a way to automate trade-show receiving (spending 15 minutes to make $8 isn’t the greatest) for nearly a decade, but everything anyone had come up with met with client rejection on account of the amount of data that would need to be shared and our inability to replicate their receiver forms.

So I got in touch with our point person and asked which portions of the (triplicate … in 2023) receiver forms were actually necessary, created a slimmed-down template I was afraid might deviate too much … and it got immediate approval.

So, I populated that sheet with formulae to pull most needed data from a master sheet that’s, unfortunately, still a manual process involving opening Microsoft Forms results and pasting, but from there, a 10-line script creates all the new receiver forms since it was last run.

The form also has image uploads, so I can pull the remaining information from those, and we have art on hand to send to the customer when there are questions instead of having to pull apart a wrapped pallet or address onsite during show setup.

And instead of the warehouse manually generating truck manifests, as well as scanning the day’s pink copies after close of business, I added the manifest to the show sheet and populated it. I send receivers daily three hours before the old system putting it firmly within client operating hours, and the warehouse prints the manifest at trailer load.

Just had my annual review. $0 raise for that work.

Seriously, I learn new software and skills; I apply experience from several industry fields to create bespoke workflows; those workflows save from 25% to 90% labor. What the fuck else do I have to do to get off the treadmill of losing purchasing power every year?

Thanks for letting me vent.