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TIFU by automating my job and getting fired.

I saw a similar post several days ago and wanted to share my near similar experience.

About 18 months after I lost my job at the airline (so around 1998) I was finished with college and working at what is now defunct MCI/Worldcom. I was a contractor put on a project to upgrade the network that brokerage houses used to access the NASDAQ stock market. My job was to make sure the field engineers recovered and sent in the retired network equipment, called CPE.

Previous to me being hired the engineers in the office were all sharing one big mess of a spreadsheet. It took me weeks to get it sorted out because it was full of duplicates, errors, deletions that shouldn’t have been made, etc. I spent a lot of time hassling with it, even sorted out better – it was just cumbersome - and so my job was a pain.

Then I realized the daily reports I ran on the mainframe could be put out as a comma delimited file. So, I wrote an Access database to make my life easier. Then I imported the good data from the spreadsheet into it. Each day I came in, ran a script on the mainframe to dump the jobs into a file, imported that into the database, and it told me what I needed to do that day. I got caught up on the backlog in a couple of weeks, and then I reduced an 8 hour workday to about 2 to 3 hours because I didn't have to manually look up each job in the mainframe.

When the boss heard about it weeks later, he asked me to demo it for him, commended me for a job well done, and that was that. I went home. An hour later I get a panicked call from the contract agency wanting to know why they terminated me. News to me, so I explained what went on. He was mad they just dumped me like that, but told me he would fix it.

A week later I was hired as one of the engineer managers for the MCI Y2K remediation project at a significant bump in salary. The hiring manager spoke to my old one and was impressed with what I had done over there. That Y2K job was a springboard to better things and better salary when the project ended, so I guess it all worked out.

TL;DR: Wrote a database that did most of my job, database given to someone else and I’m fired.

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