It is the simple things that are often the most useful. One of the accounting staff where I used to work used to spend about 2 hours each day manually comparing two data dumps (one from the accounting system and one from the bank) to make sure all the transactions matched up. They would print out both reports and use a ruler to match up lines.

It took me about 2 hours to write a little webapp where the two files could be uploaded, and it would spit out a report of all the ambiguities in about a second.

It amazes me that every worker these days has a computer on their desk, but the majority still don't have a clue what computers are really good at. They are used for writing memos and playing solitaire!

When I started working here, massive amounts of man-hours were spent on repetitive data cleaning and hand-comparison. They used to hire temp workers for a month to do jobs I can do myself with Perl in a day. It made me sad.

Fast forward a few months: last week my boss came up to me and said "I was going to have someone create a big table comparing so-and-so, but I thought I'd check and see if you could automate it instead..." Score one for teaching people the real use of computers. :)

[...] but neither of those apps has even been acknowledged.

Hmm .. I would recommend you document those cool tools so that you can remind your boss at Performance Evaluation time how useful Perl is, and how skilled you are at using it. You should add those to the living document that is your resume, as well.