I want to thank everyone for their responses. What really strikes me about the whole endeavor is it never once occurred to me to quit. Well, it did, once. But it should have occurred to me long before I bothered any of you with this insanity.
So, thank you for the help. When I did provide his properly formatted TPS reports, I was given Yet Another Requirement. He couldn't possibly be a perl hacker; rather I think he was just trying to push limits of what can be generated automatically in less time than it would take to do manually – which was his goal all along.
Sad, that. My own personal advice would be, if you find yourself in a position where your supervisor finds more and more complicated ways for your to waste your time on his behalf, to just leave. If you're of the skill level that you can write tools to automate your mundane responsibilities, you won't be looking for long, and the supervisor in question is obviously one of those pieces of human effluvia floating about the toilet bowl that is the workplace.
brother dep
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