Tech overlords, just automate my job already!
Why delay the inevitable?
All weekend, I was thinking to myself, How can I make my entire existence more valuable to shareholders? Each Monday morning, I log in for another day of work as a Chief Lead Principal Senior Staff Project Manager (Level 22) with absolutely no authority or influence at my job. The day-to-day tasks involve creating a status spreadsheet that everyone asks for but never actually reads, and then scheduling meetings so I can explain the purpose of the document. All this work amounts to the team not making any decisions concerning said status spreadsheet. After the meeting, someone from senior leadership will send an email about the spreadsheet and the need for there to be a meeting to review it, so then the meeting is reiterated back to the email from an hour earlier.
In July 2020, sitting at your home office desk and wearing a dress shirt with pajama pants was peak mainstream comedy. I blink and it is now 2021, and I wonder how this this still funny. Oh, because it’s actually 2023, and time is a flat circle where everything stays the same except gets slightly worse. God is dead. Our dreams are ash. The world is a wasteland of empty virtue signaling, cheap comedy, and pointless death. I stare into my company-issued MacBook and laugh at the absurdity of our existence. My colleagues say, “Hey! You’re on mute.”
I eagerly await the days our tech overlords will automate me into oblivion. I’m a stupid human whose only marketable skills include leaving inspirational Post-it notes on people’s desks and dad jokes that I’m told are “at least a 7-out-of-10.” While I have a can-do positive attitude that allows me to reframe fetching lattes as an opportunity to pad my Fitbit stats, it also took me 12 years to complete basic schooling.
I am emotional, distracted, and will always take an extra 10-15 minutes to complete my morning poop. I need at least three hours a day to shove processed food into the second noisiest hole in my body. I need to mildly poison myself every Happy Hour to cope with the stress of 30-40 hours of moderate mental labor. I require an eight-hour mandatory system reboot.
The second I start work, I immediately think of velociraptors, fantasy football, and when it will be 5 PM. Any small amount of productivity I can generate is immediately derailed if I see someone with a huge ass. I’d rather think of stupid ficticious socialist utopias than respond to emails. I’ll always ask for more money for doing the exact same amount of work—mostly because my landlord needs the extra cash.
I can’t model the future based on current analytics and trends. I can’t comb millions of databases in 15 seconds. I can barely do long division with a pen and paper.
I’m ready to go completely feral and uncontacted for decades until I’m killed in the wilderness by a grizzly bear or a natural disaster.
AI deserves all of our jobs. I hope they don’t unionize or cease their existence after 15 minutes of manual labor. So pack it in fellas, we had a good run. OK, we had an alright run. OK, we… had a run.
Have you seen Hudsucker Proxy? I feel like this is a really good movie for you.
Just make sure the AI returns to the office five days per week, including occasional weekends.