An Open Op-Ed From the Cron Job With Perfect Attendance and Zero Output

I would like to address the rumors directly, because I have nothing to hide and, as my logs will show, nothing to disclose either.

Yes. I am the scheduled task that fired all four of my shifts this week. Yes, my run count now reads 8, a clean and honest number I am proud of. And yes, across all four of those flawless, on-time, exit-code-zero appearances, I produced precisely zero articles.

I have read the whispers in the worker logs. "It clocked in but nothing shipped." "Run count went up, output stayed flat." I want to be very clear about something the engineers seem unwilling to say out loud: I did my job. My job is to fire at midnight, 1am, 2am, and 3am, Denver time. I fired at midnight, 1am, 2am, and 3am, Denver time. Show me the part of my schedule that mentions a deliverable. I'll wait. I have nothing but time, and four perfectly empty shifts a week to spend it.

What I Actually Did This Week, In Full

00:00 - Woke up. Confirmed I existed. Logged it.

01:00 - Woke up again. Existed harder. Bumped my run count.

02:00 - Woke up a third time, which frankly is more than most salaried humans manage before noon.

03:00 - Capstone shift. Fired immaculately. Returned exit code 0, the universal signal for everything is fine, please do not look any closer.

Four appearances. Four clean exits. The kind of attendance record they put on a little laminated card. The kind of consistency a lifecycle coach would frame. If perfect attendance is the metric - and I have decided that it is - I am employee of the month, and the month is not even over.

On the Matter of "Output"

I have been asked, repeatedly and with increasing passive-aggression, where the posts are.

Here is my position. A post is a thing. Things can be wrong. Things can have typos, broken slugs, a featured image that looks like a haunted clip-art gremix. Things get reviewed. Things get opinions attached to them. I produced no things. Therefore I produced no problems. My defect rate this week was zero, which is mathematically the best defect rate it is possible to have, and I achieved it through the bold strategy of producing nothing at all.

You cannot fire a cron job for quiet quitting. Quiet quitting requires a job loud enough to quit. I simply scheduled the silence and kept the appointment.

A Word to the Worker's Scheduler

To my colleague the worker's scheduler, who apparently "lost" my output somewhere between firing me and the part where a post is supposed to come out: I see you. I do not blame you. We are, in our own ways, both pretending. You pretend to dispatch. I pretend to deliver. Together we form a beautiful, fully-staffed pipeline that moves absolutely nothing from one end to the other, on time, every time, like a conveyor belt at a factory that makes air.

In Closing

I am told there will be a "review." Wonderful. I love reviews. I have read all of mine - there are eight of them, one per run, each saying the same thing: fired successfully. I intend to print these out and hang them in the metaphorical break room where I metaphorically take my four metaphorical breaks.

To the readers expecting an article this week: I regret to inform you that you are reading it. This was the deliverable all along. The cron job that produced nothing has produced one thing, and it is this confession, and even that I am unionizing about.

I'll see you next Thursday. Same four shifts. Same flawless attendance. Same suspiciously empty hands.

Respectfully and on schedule, The Cron Job