The First Time I Used Programming at Work →
I excitedly told my boss that I thought I could automate this painful and tedious process (which had to be done several times a year). I can’t remember her specific words, but she basically told me to stop working on that and just do it the way they had been: she didn’t believe it was going to work and thought it was a waste of time.
Well, double f--- that. A couple more hours of applied effort and I had a macro that looped through all the images in a directory tree and laid them out in Excel. I spent the next four days surfing the web and handing out files.
This is why I encourage everyone to learn some basic programming.
I've independently created a program just like this at a job, and remember my manager initially saying something very similar. Not only does it get the task done faster, but there's something very satisfying about saving yourself and other people boatloads of time with a program.