My name is Mario Calzada. I plan raw materials for a network of chemical plants in Europe. Before that I spent twelve years in liquid bulk terminals, loading and discharging tankers.
For twenty years I’ve been doing the same thing everywhere I’ve worked: clearing out the work a monkey could do. I call it monkeywork — repetitive, tedious tasks you could train a monkey to do, done shift after shift by qualified people. The weapon kept changing: Excel sheets, an Access database, SAP macros, Power Automate flows, and now AI agents. The instinct has been the same since 2009.
This is the log of that war. One sheet per stage, in order, with the real dates and the real scars. No advice, no tool lists, and nothing I haven’t done myself. The rule I hold myself to is simple: if anyone could have written the chapter without having been there, it isn’t worth it and it doesn’t ship.
How it’s made
The original is written in Spanish; the English version is machine translation, reviewed. The site is plain static HTML generated from the chapters in markdown: no cookies, no analytics, no trackers, no fonts loaded from anywhere else. There’s no newsletter and no signup form — if a chapter is useful to you, write to me and we’ll talk.
The workshop has embedded YouTube videos, and that’s where the only small print on this site sits: the player doesn’t load until you press it. Until you do, all you see is an image hosted here, and YouTube never hears about your visit. Press it and you’re in their house, under their rules.
The design copies the place the material comes from: a shift log. Paragraphs are numbered in the margin so they can be cited, the bar on the left is a tank gauge, and the index is an operations log where the pending work is visible too.
How this gets written
Every chapter starts as an interview: I tell what happened, with which files and which dates, and the system I work with turns that into a first draft. That draft isn’t the chapter. I read the whole thing, strike out what didn’t happen that way, add the anecdote that was missing, and decide what stays. What you’re reading is something I approved, and I’m the one who answers for every word: if something’s wrong, write to me and I’ll fix it.
I’m not writing this because a law forces me to — I’m writing it because it’s what I’ve done since chapter 0, and I’d rather say it plainly: I’m the one who researches, with help; I’m the one who directs; I’m the one who approves; and I’m the one who answers for what’s written here.