This made me think of an old gig I had. It was a sort of so-easy-a-caveman-could-do-it tech support job. They actually had us printing out a report from an HTML

This made me think of an old gig I had. It was a sort of so-easy-a-caveman-could-do-it tech support job. They actually had us printing out a report from an HTML document, cutting out portions that weren't supposed to be there with scissors, and then photocopying the cut up page to get a final report to mail out to the client. I'll let that sink in... It didn't take me long to start editing the HTML document directly to skip the physical work (someone before me had figured this much out, but hadn't been able to teach anyone else well enough to pass it along when he left, just a vague rumor that it had happened). Then I went ahead and made a crude script to edit the documents automatically, ultimately turning an hour long job into a 2 minute one with cleaner looking results. Ended up spending a lot of time at that job just watching TV. My next job after that was all about automating manual processes, but with less down time since I was automating other people's jobs, rather than my own. I think I preferred the former.