Job security nightmare

I became gradually conscious I was doing some prolonged writing that amounted to repetitive text entry, and that I was strenuously arguing with someone. “Come on,” I was saying. “I can script this! No? At least let me set up a keyboard macro!” and so on.

I literally woke up in a sweat. I have had technical writing gigs where I had just this argument with management. Sometimes I lost the argument and was condemned to trudgery. Sometimes I won and automated myself out of a job.

There are other possible outcomes, but of the two, I usually prefer the latter. It’s more honest, and more fun.

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Photo “Space-cadet keyboard” by Dave Fischer, Retro-Computing Society of RI (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.