I had a similar experience. I was an junior accountant at my first job - I was tasked with combining a bunch of timesheets for several manufacturing facilities into one large timesheet to calculate payroll weekly.

I quickly grew bored of this and learned a bit of VBA to do automate the process, started learning RoR, Django, and moved on to technical jobs at other companies.

Funny thing about those first scripts I wrote - although they were relatively bugfree, they didn't account for having been run more than once per week. So one week when I was out of the office (and had run payroll remotely) a colleague ran the scripts and everyone was paid double. I left the company shortly after.