I managed to get employee of the quarter because the company I worked for (a major company that made inkjet printers) had been tasked to find out more about third party ink cartridges from their service system.
This company had a Pick database, and rather than extend it normally someone had the bright idea of storing each ink cartridge record in a .INI file. That's right, each record was a .INI file and the fields were stored as column=value.
To get at this data, they tasked one of their employees to open each file, copy the first field to an Excel spreadsheet, then copy the second field to the Excel spreadsheet, etc. There were something like 10,000 ini files, and it took about 6 weeks for the guy to input the data.
I was rather young and bored on the call centre helpdesk, and I had been fooling about with Linux and Perl. When I heard what he was doing, I rather naively said that this was what Perl was designed for. The guy deliberately said he didn't believe me, and I took that as a challenge so that night I went home and whipped up a Perl program that processed the ini files into a CSV file. I then installed ActiveState's Windows port of Perl and ran it over a copy of the ini files. About 5 seconds later it produced the csv file.
I told the guy to not tell anyone as I wasn't really meant to install ActiveState's program on any corporate computers. He ignored this and the next thing I know I was made employee of the quarter.
I think the highlight of this story is that the company had the culture to reward you instead of burying your achievement under policy-violation blanket.
This company had a Pick database, and rather than extend it normally someone had the bright idea of storing each ink cartridge record in a .INI file. That's right, each record was a .INI file and the fields were stored as column=value.
To get at this data, they tasked one of their employees to open each file, copy the first field to an Excel spreadsheet, then copy the second field to the Excel spreadsheet, etc. There were something like 10,000 ini files, and it took about 6 weeks for the guy to input the data.
I was rather young and bored on the call centre helpdesk, and I had been fooling about with Linux and Perl. When I heard what he was doing, I rather naively said that this was what Perl was designed for. The guy deliberately said he didn't believe me, and I took that as a challenge so that night I went home and whipped up a Perl program that processed the ini files into a CSV file. I then installed ActiveState's Windows port of Perl and ran it over a copy of the ini files. About 5 seconds later it produced the csv file.
I told the guy to not tell anyone as I wasn't really meant to install ActiveState's program on any corporate computers. He ignored this and the next thing I know I was made employee of the quarter.