Many moons ago, when I was young and working as a lowly IT service monkey, the client (a huge corporation) decided to migrate from their prehistoric, image-depl

Many moons ago, when I was young and working as a lowly IT service monkey, the client (a huge corporation) decided to migrate from their prehistoric, image-deployed Win95 setup to a centrally managed WinXP setup. This went about as terribly as you can expect and we ended up with a long checklist of things that needed fixing manually, on each of the 1200 computers we were responsible for. So I stayed an hour or two longer every couple days and each time picked one task from the checklist and wrote a Python script that would do that job for me (such as making sure some .INI file were having the right settings, or some registry settings were set, or some installer was run). Soon enough, the script was doing enough of my work so that my time could be spent working on the script instead of mindnumbingly editing the same INI file over and over again, and eventually the script did everything. I shared it with my colleagues and soon the 40-point checklist was reduced to: 1. Run the script. It also provided me with excellent job security and a route into later software development jobs :)