Working over the holidays? Why not program a script to do all of it

28 Dec 2015

If you’re one of the unfortunate people who has to work over the Christmas period, then why not use this handy program that someone created to automate their office (at least, for them).

You might be there only in body, but those working over the Christmas period will be looking to make the experience as palatable as possible, which might be helped by one man’s efforts to turn frustrations into results.

Earlier this year, an anonymous programmer who left his job completely frustrated raised a few chuckles after his replacement found a whole series of scripts that look like something the characters of Office Space would have made.

Posted online to GitHub for anyone with coding knowledge to tinker around with, the catalogue entitled Narkoz by the replacement, the anonymous programmer was believed to be the type of person where “if something – anything – requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that.”

Although, it seems the programmer has something of a pottymouth having decided to put some colourful language into the file names, so be warned if you find mysterious files on your computer if you download the scripts.

For example, one of the scripts is called ‘fucking-coffee.sh’ which allowed the programmer to gain access to the office’s coffee machine 17 seconds after the script is activated and pour his coffee 24 seconds after it was brewed.

This, it was found out, was due to the exact amount of time it took him to walk from his desk to the machine.

Now that’s using your time well.

Gigglebit is Siliconrepublic.com’s daily dose of the funny and fantastic in science and tech, to help start your day on a lighter note.

Working over Christmas image via Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com