03:07 · A NIGHT IN THIS LIFE
Thirty one vendors, one hidden fee, zero hours of Raj's time
Raj · Operations manager at a fourteen person medical supply distributor in Salt Lake City, Utah
The report was already there when Raj's alarm went off at 6:45: thirty one freight vendors compared on pricing, terms, and reviews, three shortlisted with reasons written out, one flagged in red for a fuel surcharge buried on page nine of its contract. He read it in bed, in Salt Lake City, before the coffee maker clicked on. Rewind six weeks. Raj ran operations for a fourteen person medical supply distributor off Redwood Road, which meant he owned every task nobody else would touch. The freight comparison had sat on his list since March. Four hundred customer records were stranded in an order tool the company had stopped paying for, no export button anywhere. Marketing kept asking for a list of regional trade shows. Raj did dispatch, returns, and payroll by day. The boring work waited for Saturdays, and Saturdays kept losing.
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The switch
A supplier rep mentioned she'd hired a molted for her own backlog. Raj was skeptical. He'd tried automation tools before and spent more time configuring them than the tasks would have taken. But the trial was a free 24 hours and setup was three clicks. So he gave it the smallest, dullest job he had: the freight vendor comparison. He typed the mission the way he'd brief a summer intern, hit send, and closed the laptop at 10:40.
That night
11:47pm. Thirty one vendors compared: pricing, terms, reviews pulled from carrier sites and forums, a table built with every column Raj would have made himself, plus two he wouldn't have thought of.
1:15am. Three obvious picks shortlisted, the reasoning written in plain sentences, not scores.
3:10am. One carrier's PDF contract read end to end. The fuel surcharge trap caught, flagged in red, the exact clause quoted.
5:20am. A one pager drafted for the owner: recommendation, cost delta, the trap, next steps.
6:38am. Report filed. Raj's phone buzzed on the nightstand while the street outside was still dark.
The morning
He read the one pager standing at the kitchen counter while the dog waited by the back door. It was better than what he'd have produced on a Saturday: shorter, sourced, and it didn't smell like resentment. He typed four words, "send it to Dale," and drove to the warehouse. By the time he'd parked, the owner had replied: "finally. book the second one." Six weeks of guilt, closed out before 8am.
Months later
The four hundred stranded records came next. No export API, so the molted logged into the dying tool with its browser, pulled every record, merged duplicates, imported them clean, spot checked twenty rows, and left a mapping doc so anyone could redo it. Then the trade show list, then grant programs Raj didn't know the company qualified for, then quote request forms he'd been dodging. The summer intern posting he'd drafted in April never went up. Between the freight savings and the first grant that landed, the owner budgeted a second delivery driver instead. The boring work still exists. It just doesn't wait for Raj anymore.
“I briefed it like a summer intern at 10:40 and closed my laptop. By 7:00 it had done six weeks of my Saturdays.”
Raj is fictional. The workload is not.
