A friend told me a story of a job he got with a consulting company working for a phone company. Their job was to move all of the data from the old system to th

A friend told me a story of a job he got with a consulting company working for a phone company. Their job was to move all of the data from the old system to the new system. They had a multiyear contract where they charged millions to move this data. When he got there, two terminals were set up - one the old system and the other the new. His job was to read the data from one screen and type it by hand into the other. He was one of hundreds of low paid contractors hired for typing skills. After a few days of that drudgery, he decidedly said screw this, ^C the app, and ended up at a shell. He spent the next two weeks figuring out how to copy the data file from the old system to the new, and then used a handful of shell scripts to successfully convert the majority of the data. He showed his boss what he'd done, and was swiftly fired. If anybody found out, they didn't want to lose their lucrative multiyear contract. They'd rather type it all in by hand.