I have a much happier story, luckily. My first internship in college was in R&D of a Fortune 500 company testing bugfixes for software that ran $1M+ machines.

I have a much happier story, luckily. My first internship in college was in R&D of a Fortune 500 company testing bugfixes for software that ran $1M+ machines. Sometimes this involved following test matrices to exercise the machines. At the end of the test or when something went wrong, you had to read operational data off a terminal emulator on the PC hooked up to the debug port on the machine, and then log that data in the tracking system as part of the report. The manual data entry was horribly boring and error-prone. There were a few dozen test operators who did nothing but run matrices all day so it sucked up a substantial amount of man-hours too. Once I discovered the way-fancier-than-it-needed-to-be terminal emulator had its own scripting language, I hatched a plan. In my spare time I figured out how to automate the commands in the terminal emulator to make the machine spit out the appropriate debug data, and then I researched Windows automation and figured out how to automatically copy the data out of the terminal emulator into the reporting software. I had to deal with the machine OS developers moving debug menus around constantly for no reason (hello escaping to root menu and then regexps) and all sorts of messy stuff. End result: one button press and all the data magically appears in the report. Once I had the kinks worked out from using it myself, I gave it to one of the operators. Instant hit. Within a couple weeks everyone had it. Luckily management was pretty great about it - I never asked anyone before I did it. They saw how much better the automated way was and how much time/money/productivity it was saving them and heartily endorsed it (and gave me a raise). I always hoped they managed to find someone to maintain it after I left.