“Don’t worry about it. No human may want to do it, but the computer doesn’t mind. I can set up a program for you that’ll do the work for you.”

Shalom sighed as he waved me into his office. Before I sat down, he gestured to the petite young woman who had just walked out the door.

“She just quit on me. Been here less than a month. And I can’t keep anyone in this job for too long.”

My expression may have alerted him that I thought he sounded like a pretty bad boss, and he quickly clarified.

“The job is so tedious, but vital to my business’s success. I’m already paying way above the going rate, and still, I can’t get anyone to stay.”

Shalom is the CEO of a boutique travel agency. He’d invited me to his office to discuss issues he’d been dealing with, hoping that software might be the solution.

“What exactly is this job that no one wants to do?” I asked him. “How horrible could it be, already?”

He shrugged. “Pretty horrible, to be honest. I wouldn’t be willing to do it myself either, and I totally understand the people who keep quitting on me. It’s just frustrating because I really need someone to do it.” He looked dejected.

“This is how my business works: Our clients reach out to us because they want to go on the perfect vacation, and they want everything to be taken care of for them. We make our money by taking a fee for getting them incredibly good deals on flights, hotel stays, rental cars, and other attractions, plus an additional fee if we get them deals that are well below what they would have paid otherwise.”

“I hear.” I nodded, envisioning the kind of vacations they put together.

“So we need to constantly be on top of airfares and hotel prices and look out for deals on attractions so we can nab deals for our clients without compromising their standards,” he continued.

I was starting to see where he was going, but I let him get there himself. “Okay, I’m with you.”

“The miserable job that must be done is to take a list of websites — a very long list, I’ll admit — and check them twice a day to monitor prices. Then the data needs to be saved in a spreadsheet so our travel agents can compare prices without needing to actually look on all of the sites.”