Well I had a task at work to get the mileage from two of our offices to a bunch of cities to see who was closer. Using WWW::Mechanize I went to one website to grab the zipcodes of all the cities. I did have to write a wrapper script to sleep for a bit as it only allowed me to look up 6 zip codes at a time though.

Next I took that list, and plugged it in to MapQuest and scraped for the distances.Needless to say, without WWW::Mechanize it would have taken me hours to do this by hand, while it took mere minutes to have the computer do it.

There is a great joy in writing something automated, going for a quick break, and coming back to find all your work done. :)