William was the first to exploit it. He needed to rush a proposal—his concepts were always grand and flashy, but his details were hollow. He'd dump fragmented ideas and raw materials onto my desk.
"Alex, your writing's decent. Sort this mess out and draft a preliminary version for me."
I stayed up late, reading through dense background materials. I stitched his fragmented thoughts into a logical narrative, filling in the missing market analysis and execution steps he'd been too lazy to research.
When I handed it in, he made a few cosmetic tweaks and presented it as his own "painstaking masterpiece." The client praised him for combining creativity with practical implementation.
Then there was Blake. Whenever he hit a technical wall, he didn't bother troubleshooting. He just walked over and dropped his laptop in front of me.
"Little Alex, this code won't run. Find the bug. I have a meeting."
I wasn't a professional programmer. I had to rely on my self-taught foundation and sheer grit, debugging line by line, cross-referencing manuals, sometimes spending the entire day on his errors.