Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

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This exchange has been the long drawn out version of:

> > Story

> r/thathappened

r/nothingeverhappens

---

Where subreddit "ThatHappened" is a sarcastic one, a response to far-fetched and unlikely sounding stories, implying they are not true. Such response has been overdone enough that subreddit "NothingEverHappens" has become a reply implying that unlikely sounding things actually do happen.

And all of it is a real-world version of the joke "a person walks into a bar, and hears one of the regulars say 'number 38' and the other regulars laugh. A bit later another one says 'number 17' and they laugh. The person asks a regular what's going on, and they say 'we have all been here so long and told the same jokes so often that we know all the same jokes and just refer to them by numbers. Try one yourself'. The person says 'number 22'. Nobody laughs. The regular shrugs, eh, it's the way you tell 'em".

But suggesting that joke plays out in real life might be r/thathappens . But it does happen, and people do laugh.

The story is most likely made up and one of the last clarifications strongly hints at it:

> It can't be this simple / this is fake because you aren't doing blah blah. You're right, it's not this simple. There are more steps involved in the script and it performs functions I haven't discussed. [...] The core of the script, transfer and hash, is accurate

The person focuses on transfer and hash and keeps what looks like an absolutely critical part of the process as barely a mention: checking against a spreadsheet where the automation is most vulnerable. Tens of thousands of files means just as many opportunities for a typo in that spreadsheet. And yet the job is still 10 minutes per day.

Also with the popularity this gained, not being worried at all that the employers can guess who this is about just because they left out some parts of the job is a bit hilarious. Somehow I can buy that a mid-sized law firm never realized how easy it is to automate this task. But nobody ever suspecting they're the actors in the story despite the process being fairly unique? That I don't buy.

Everything sounds like a very inexperienced person telling a story they can only fantasize about.

> But nobody ever suspecting they're the actors in the story despite the process being fairly unique?

In a past life I used to write for a local TV soap. I would constantly take personal events that my friends and family told me about, minimally jazz them up, and have them happen to our regular cast. I was there for five years and not one person noticed that their story was on the show. It's all about context.

You overestimate how much managers and employers browse social media. Especially non-tech organization, they may not even know what Reddit is.

And no, this isn't a unique experience, given how many people here alone chimed in on similar automation strategies in non-tech situations. It can be weird if you're in tech and you're managing billion line codebases, but you'd be surprised how much a non-tech company would value a 100 line automation script you whip up in a week. The only risk in that relationship is your skills growing stale for if/when you need to change jobs

“Number 22!”

“We don’t say that one anymore. You’re going to have to leave.”

"Number 73!"

All regulars are laughing, hard. They shout out in turns "73!", and laugh again. Confused, the person asks what's so good about 73. Says a regular, catching his breath and wiping tears from his eyes: "Heh 73, we haven't heard that one before!"

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