He Called Me a Fool for Working Hard, Then Cried When the Fool Left Chapter 03

He Called Me a Fool for Working Hard, Then Cried When the Fool Left Chapter 03

Finance work wasn’t complicated.

Mostly reviewing expense reports, organizing receipts, helping build spreadsheets.

I spent three days clearing out two months of backed up receipts. Then I went through last year’s files and reorganized them by date.

Denise, the woman at the next desk, saw me busting my ass and said, “Elizabeth, slow down. The work’s not going anywhere.”

I smiled and kept going.

Slow down for what?

If I slowed down, I’d just start thinking about everything. Better to stay busy.

But I didn’t go looking for trouble. Trouble found me.

One day I was in the cafeteria eating lunch.

Two women from Marketing sat down across from me. They didn’t know who I was.

“Did you hear about Engineering’s project bonus? Two million. Marcus Harlow took most of it himself,” one of them said.

“I heard. Even the junior people got paid. An intern walked away with fifty grand.”

“The project was stuck at first. I heard some woman from Finance went over and fixed it.”

“Finance? A woman who can code? That doesn’t sound right.”

“Who knows if it’s even true. Maybe she just got lucky.”

“How much did she get?”

“Nothing. Worked for free. Stupid, right?”

They both laughed.

I kept my head down and ate.

I heard comments like that a few more times after that.

In the bathroom. In the hallway. Once in the elevator.

People talking. Then they’d turn around, see me, and go quiet.

I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t angry.

I’d already thought about it myself.

A fresh college grad gets used and tossed aside without even a thank you. Of course people were going to laugh.

If I were in their shoes, maybe I’d laugh too.

Go ahead and laugh.

Someday, some of them won’t be laughing.

I started studying Finance’s workflow carefully.

Expense reimbursements moved slow. From submission to deposit, it took two weeks on average.

Approvals stacked up: department head, finance review, finance director, CEO signature. Any one of them could stall the whole thing.

I spent a week pulling data on every reimbursement from the past year.

Sixty percent of the delays happened at the same step.

The review process was all manual: someone had to look at every single invoice. High volume. Prone to mistakes.

If something didn’t pass, it got sent back and the whole cycle started over. That took days.

I started wondering if I could automate it.

That idea got stuck in my head, so I started working on it after hours.

The company’s finance system was old and had no API access. But it could export Excel files.

I studied the format until I knew it perfectly. Then I wrote a Python script that could automatically read the invoice numbers and codes from the spreadsheet, check them against the IRS’s public database, and write the results back.

It wasn’t a new concept. Lots of off-the-shelf software could do it. But the company hadn’t bought any.

I built my own. It cost nothing.

Three days later, I had the basic functionality running.

I spent a few more days tweaking it and got the accuracy from eighty percent to over ninety-five.

The remaining five percent were usually blurry scans or invoices with obstructed information. Those still needed a human.

I had the script ready. But I didn’t show it to anyone yet.

Because I’d already learned something important.

In a new environment, what you actually did didn’t matter as much as what people thought you did.

So I kept working like normal. Kept being polite. Kept my head down.

One day Denise came back with a stack of invoices, sweating.

“I’m going to be here late again. If I don’t finish these by Friday, the month end report is going to be late.”

I looked at her stack. At least two hundred invoices.

“Denise, let me help.”

She glanced at me. “You have your own work to do. I’ll handle it.”

“I’m caught up. I’ve got nothing else right now.”

I took the invoices, opened my laptop, and pulled up the script I’d written.

Denise didn’t notice what I was doing. She started going through her stack.

The script processed every invoice in under a minute.

About fifteen minutes later, she looked up. “Elizabeth, you haven’t even looked at one yet?”

“I’m already done.”

“What?”

“Two hundred and thirteen invoices. Six of them have issues. I flagged all of them.”