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. :)