This reminds me of a personal experience. I used to work for a programming startup, we all worked from home and logged into an IRC channel to communicate. Peo

This reminds me of a personal experience. I used to work for a programming startup, we all worked from home and logged into an IRC channel to communicate. People would come and go and you;d have the rounds of "hello", "good morning", "how are you today" etc. so I wrote an IRC hello_bot to do it for me, made a list of my typical greetings and that all was good. It only ran when I was logged in so if more interaction was required, I was on hand. Eventually our Sales Manager worked out it was a bot and got really angry, while the tech people (everyone but him) thought it was a cool and fun thing. He didn't appreciate that my bot to say hello to him probably took me more effort to get right than I ever put into actually saying hello. It was a good lesson to me. (later we found he had been skimming money off the top of contracts, rippig us off for thousands and the company ceased trading, I'm not sure if that's related :)