In my first "real" job, I worked at a publisher manually entering orders from paper and email into their production system. Multiple orders for multiple produc

In my first "real" job, I worked at a publisher manually entering orders from paper and email into their production system. Multiple orders for multiple products required A LOT of repetitive typing: menu button pressing, addresses, costs, products. I installed AutoHotKey (take that corporate security!) and over a few weeks wrote up a script that would let you supply an excel file with summarised stats about the orders you had that day. It would then physically automate the rest of the process using mouse/keyboard macros, like the office equivalent of a player piano. It even had a little finite-state machine that knew where it was in the production system. For each order it knew where it had to be, and thus it could get from/to every other area of the production system by sending simulated keyboard/mouse-clicks. I don't care what anyone says, sure an actual program would have been faster, but that wasn't an option. In full flight it was awesome to behold. Like all the promises of labour saving technology made manifest! Of course, I soon learnt that labour saving was not the point of a corporation, but for the next few months until I quit, it was pretty cool...